Thread

We are currently working with a client who has a pretty massive online presence already. They approached us to redesign and restructure all of their sites. The have several product lines and each one will have their own site(Look and Feel). They are going to need a CMS for working with news and adding of content as well as a blog. After looking around for a system that I felt was powerful yet simple to work with and design custom templates for I found EE. My boss has instructed me to get up a test version to present to the client for approval. The test version will need to have the cms available for them to see how it will work and what not. I need to be able to control content across all of their sites. Example the wish to display the latest news for the company on each product lines homepage. This news to be set so that they can specify what product lines will show each article when they add it.

Through reading over your documentation and playing around in the free version I can see that there is no clear cut way to do this. I am just wondering if this is possible? What I would need to accomplish this?

I have noticed that there does not seem to be a where clause in your exp code. So actually selecting from the database by a set value might not be possible?

Good morning, stickybomb,

This is a difficult question to answer because, ultimately, there are at least 5 ways to set this up.  I would recommend having a look at the Multiple Site Manager - and you can see the back-end of that in the 30 day hosted demo.

What you are asking to do is ultimately not difficult; but you’ll want to really familiarize yourself with ExpressionEngine and decide the best method to do so.  Given that each product should essentially have their own look and feel, I think the MSM is the best option for you.  We use it here for similar reasons, and you can find all our sites linked from EllisLab.com. =)

unfortunately the multiple site manager does not sound like a good deal. not only is it an additional charge for the manger but you are limited in the amount of sites. Our client has a a lot of product lines. Not to mention they will most likely be adding more in the future.

The only thing that I really need to share across them is the one news weblog. That needs to be restricted to a certain set of sites per article. As for the templates there is no way to specify a certain template for a specific page or directory or something?

For the size of there site and what they need it would not be cost effective to go with the multiple sites thing.

Is there another method you could recommend?

Hi Stickybomb, just for the record, you’re NOT limited to 3 sites with MSM (Multi-site Manager), that’s just how many the initial purchase supports. If you are supporting lots of sites, that can get expensive, but the benefits are it can allow different groups of people to manage each of the sites individually, and share items when they need to be shared. Otherwise, as Lisa says there are a number of ways to do what you want, you may want to look through the documentation on subsites or even the wiki to get more ideas. I’d even recommend the forums, I know I’ve seen at least three or four threads recently on the topic.