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Building a Dynamic Multi-site Presence Off-the-shelf Just because you can create customize functionality in your Drupal site, that doesn’t mean you need to. Come see how SGIA.org transformed their web presence by coloring within the lines. Not only did they build three websites on one installation and incorporate commerce functionality, they also created an online experience dedicated to ensuring their audience can find the rich and useful content they offer. We would like to share with you the strategies we used, the issues we faced, and the solutions we devised. This includes: - Tagging strategies and related content - Not your typical search functionality - Transitioning strategies to move between three themes - Commerce functionality and multiple domains Slides from our 2014 CapitalCampDC presentation. http://2014.capitalcampandgovdays.com/capital-camp-and-gov-days/sessions/building-dynamic-multi-site-presence-shelf
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Building a Dynamic Multi-‐site Presence Off-‐the-‐shelf
Eric Johnson @elstudio Cindy McCourt @cindymcqt
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0. INTRODUCTIONSHow to succeed in multi-‐site building without really coding
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Eric Johnson
• Developer, Proprietor of el-‐studio.com
• Integrator of AMS/CRM/Drupal Commerce
• Loves writing code. But do we really need to?
• “There’s more than one way to do it”
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@elstudio http://el-‐studio.com
Cindy McCourt
• Site builder • Author of Drupal: The Guide to Planning & Building Websites
• Translates between tech & less-‐tech folks
• Taught the SGIA team what they need to know about fields, content types, taxonomy
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@cindymcqt http://idcminnovations.com/contact
SGIA
• Trade association represents several specialties – Garment decorators – Color graphics – Industrial
• A wealth of content • An AMS tracks people & memberships – Memberships determine the level of access onsite
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@SGIA_graphics www.sgia.org
What about you?
• Need to address multiple audiences with one editorial team?
• Want help with Drupal’s more-‐than-‐one-‐way-‐to-‐do-‐it? • Multi-‐site • Search • Content targeting
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Who me? by Regina
1. GOALSFor the project, and for the development team
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Project goals[...]
1. Address SGIA's separate Garment Decorators and Graphics audiences with distinct-‐but-‐related website designs and targeted content
2. Implement a standard look and feel across a decade worth of how-‐tos and technical resources
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Project goals[...]
3. Expose all SGIA content -‐-‐ web pages, spreadsheets, Word and PDF documents -‐-‐ to full-‐text search
4. Suggest related content dynamically, based on tags and full-‐text content analysis
5. Allow convenient access from both mobile and desktop browsers
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Project goals[...]
6. Build staff capacity with Drupal so that future site enhancements can benefit from SGIA's in-‐house graphics and programming expertise
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Dev team goals
• No code is best • Somebody else's code is better • Write code as last resort
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2. THEMESDesign: Fabulous, separate, themes
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Shared base theme (sgia_base)
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SGIA_garment theme
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SGIA_expo theme
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Consider: So how do we switch between themes?
• Standard Drupal Multisite • Great for separate sites — with separate databases, users, content etc.
• Domain Access modules[...]
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Domain Access allows Shared Content…
17See Trellon's Developer blog for details
Consider: So how do we switch between themes?
• Standard Drupal Multisite • Domain Access module[...] • But I don't want to have separate users, database tables, DNS configurations, etc. I just want to switch themes.
• Help me, big blue drop!
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Themekey module!
• Switches theme based on path – Choose Expo theme if path is /expo/* – Choose Garment theme if /garment/*
• Or a node's taxonomy terms – Failing that, set theme based directly on [field-‐subsite]
– Reset to Base theme if needed
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Explicit Theme Selection
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field_subsite, a list field, rules the themes
Pathauto URL alias sets a page's path based on the [field-‐subsite] taxonomy vocabulary
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Choose Expo theme if path is /expo/*
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Failing that, set theme based directly on [field-‐subsite]
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Reset to Base theme if needed
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3. CONTENTFor each audience, and for multiple audiences
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Taxonomy Has Many Jobs
• Assign content to different community audiences • Select the appropriate theme
• Site architecture • Establish content relationships
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Communities
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Community, a taxonomy vocabulary, indicates which audiences the content targets
Site Architecture
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Related Content Relies on Tags
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Related Content via Views
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4. SEARCHAdapting search results to our audiences
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Separate search boxes for each theme
• Results optimized for each audience – Regular search[...] – Garment searches only Garment content[...] • Nodes where Community is Garment • field_vocab_community_tref contains “Garment” • Configuration: an apachesolr search page with custom filters[...]
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Configuration: an apachesolr search page with custom filters[...]
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Configuration: An apachesolr_search view
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Consider: SearchAPI vs apachesolr
• SearchAPI does a better job of supporting views & Drupally stuff like entity display modes —Can talk to Solr, using the search_api_solr module —It loads nodes before you or views sees them, so search_api_views act like you'd expect
—Because it's loading nodes, it can also be less efficient than apachesolr...
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Consider: SearchAPI vs apachesolr
• apachesolr is much closer to Solr than Drupal –Must know solr lingo to configure it: "im_field_vocab_community_tref:2"
– apachesolr_views can require 4+ patches to get common use cases working
– But apachesolr_attachments is the game in town for indexing Word, PDF or other file attachments
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5. COMMERCEMulti-‐site considerations for commerce
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Commerce Implications
• We ran commerce on a single domain • SSL can be an issue • Yes, Either buy a wildcard SSL certificate • That’s a cert for *.sgia.org
• But Apache SSL requires a separate IP per SSL domain
• Or run them singly
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6. RECAPWhat have we learned today?
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What have we learned?
• You can do lots of Drupal without writing code
• There’s more than one way to do it
• Ask: How can I empower the team?
• Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should
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School by Elizabeth Albert
Questions? Drop us a line…
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Cindy McCourt @cindymcqt http://idcminnovations.com/contact
Eric Johnson @elstudio http://el-‐studio.com
