Thread

To all:

I could not find a previous post regarding this exact subject.  I want to know if it is possible to share content among 3 or 4 sites (mainly “Pages”) and would it be advisable to use the MSM (Multi-Site Manager) to make changes to the core site and then propagate those changes to the remaining three via script (or possible plugin)?

Yes, I know for SEO purposes the shared content does not work - but our model does not truly require that visitors make their way to the site via a Search engine query.

Also, I need to have separate membership databases for each site.

I want to also like to run separate forum instances for each site as well.

I hope this is not too confusing.  Basically, my requirements would be the following:

1) 4 sites with shared Content
2) Each site has own Membership tables or DB
3) Each site has its own Forum module
4) How does MSM help solve any of the above issues (if any)?

Thanks in advance for any advice / suggestions,

Brandon

Hi Brandon,

I haven’t used the MSM module yet, but I’ve seen places for its entries all over the database. You can create separate per-site weblogs, member groups and forums.

MSM seems to be the way to go.

Also, I need to have separate membership databases for each site.

The MSM won’t help you with that. There is only one membership group of tables, membership is shared between all sites.

You could create separate membership groups, though. Would that work for you?

Also all the sites have to be on the same server, and owned by the same person.

Thank you all for the replies thus far.

My main question still remains if it is possible to share content with multiple sites? So, I make updates to Site 1 and Sites 2,3,4 receive identical content.

Any one care to comment???

Brandon

You could use Magpie or Feedgrab to share content via RSS.

Lisa,

Thanks for your PM and response to the Forum Thread.  We have considered the use of Feed syndication via PHP libraries such as those referenced in your post but would like to be able to push content updates to all sites on the Database level.

Thus, we desire the ability (and this might be too elegant of a solution) to make a change to the “Core” site within ExpressionEngine and have the content propagated to three or four other EE sites. Obviously, they would reside on the same server and would ideally share the “content” Database or Database table.

I hope that makes sense.  If the RSS method is the best way to duplicate content, I wonder if anybody has made an EE module or extension to facilitate the auto-syndication of an entry across several EE sites??

Thanks again -

Brandon (phishee)

Feedgrab would allow you to parse the RSS into actual entries in the database, which is why I mentioned it.

Thanks Lisa - I did not know that Feedgrab would do that and I also see that it is a plugin for Expression Engine.  SweetCron looks promising as well but may not have as tight integration in EE as FeedGrab.

I appreciate your responses - Brandon

I implemented the FeedGrab plugin yesterday.  It works as advertised and might be an eventual solution to a problem of duplicate content spread among several sites.

My question now would be how to deal with entries which our Pages not Posts.  Since I have not played with the full version of ExpressionEngine with the Pages module I am unsure how the syndication of such pages actually works.

Thus, does anybody know if it would this be possible to use FeedGrab to populate a site that uses pages rather than weblog posts for its main content?

Thanks again - Brandon (phishee)

Pages (as in the Pages module) are just weblog entries with a custom URI.  I’m not sure if FeedGrab handles the custom URI bit, you’d need to ask the author.

It’ll handle the rest of it since it’s just a weblog entry.