Does anyone know of any learning resources for building MSM sites that have the same structure/architecture? Blog posts? screencasts? books?
I didn’t have any trouble finding learning resources that give an overview of MSM. They include the EE docs and Emily Lewis’ recent talk at Engine Summit.
In contrast, there seem to be few resources that delve more deeply into MSM. And fewer still that provide details about sites with identical structure/architecture. The best so far has been John Rogerson’s chat with the EE Podcast folks last fall (Thank you, John, Ryan, and Lea!).
I’m currently brainstorming my first MSM project. It will support a scientific research community that is spread across the U.S. There will be one national level website and 6 regional websites. The regional websites will have identical structure/architecture (they need independent administration, hence MSM). Some of regional content (ie news) will be used on the national website. And some of the national content (ie science publications) will be tightly woven into the regional websites.
Given such a MSM scenario, what are some best practices for development? In particular, how does one create templates that are easy to maintain *and* load quickly? I’ve built a couple of EE sites in the past few years, but never a MSM project.
My current ideas build upon the EE Podcast episode on MSM and a great forum reply from M. Boyink:
“A couple of hints:
- You can embed templates across sites, so consider having one site that is all templates and no content, and other sites that are all content and no (or few) templates.
- You can create variable variable names to make templates resusable. Read that again, slowly.. Variable variable names. What I’ve done in the past is create sites with a two-letter site short name (en, fr, uk) etc, and then name my custom fields in the sites with that same value as a prefix:
{uk_home_details}, {en_home_details} etc.
Then in the centralized code templates you can do:
{{site_short_name}_home_details}
And it will work…”
Ahhh… the “variable variable names” idea is perfect!
But… I’m fuzzy on how to best apply the first point about templates and content. For my scenario, what’s the best way to minimize the number of templates for the 6 regional websites *and* have them load quickly?
My initial thoughts don’t seem correct:
* For the 1st regional website, build centralized code templates, using variable variable names, etc.
Have these centralized templates include embedded templates for navigation, footer, includes, etc.
* For the remaining 5 regional websites, use the same template groups and template names,
but delete the code and replace with embeds to the centralized code templates.
It seems like there should be simpler way to do this Can I reduce the number of templates and avoid nesting the embeds?
... hence my interest in hearing about MSM best practices.
Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.