Thread

Hello,
I have a problem with solution to my friend idea. He want to have one site with two (or more) front-end designs (templates sets). I was searching for add-on that will help me do that, but nothing interesting.

He want to:
- have two domains: theme1.domain.com and theme2.domain.com
- he want to use for those two domains different themes
- he want to have in those themes the same content from channels (no duplicated content)

If anybody know add-on for that, or idea how I can write this add-on - please help me with your guidance.

I want to add also, that this will be one site but with different front-end design.

Thank you.

I understand exactly what you are trying to do, but in your post you don’t mention what would be required to decide between the two themes? Would it be down to a url, member, member group etc?

If it is down to a member group you can achieve that without an add-on - simply use a conditional to pick up the logged in member’s group and then set the stylesheets or embedded templates based on that. Another option would be two sets of template groups and that way you can use the url to dictate which of the template groups to use…

Look of the site will depend from a domain. theme1.domain.com will have different look that theme2.domain.com. Also the link structure will be the same on both sites. Also I don’t want to add every time new “if” or “if else” for every new look.

I get you. To be honest though I’m not sure it’s something that can easily be done with EE using subdomains. There might be a clever htaccess hack that you could switch the subdomain to the first segment to call a specific template group maybe, but I’m speculating on that one?

Failing that could you not just use template groups on their own and use a domain.com/theme1 , domain.com/theme2 setup?

Using template group is not an option. I have idea how module/plugin that I must write will work, but still I want to talk about this with other people 😉 Maybe there is already add-on for that, if not or there will be no good ideas I will write add-on and post it at this forum or on devot-ee.com

I did some digging as I too can see a use for it on some sites, see if this post helps in anyway…

http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/193204

Multiple Site Manager would work for this.

But I did write that “the same content” and “no duplicated content”, and tell me if I’m wrong but MSM will duplicate channels, content, files etc.

Can you use masked domain forwarding and separate template groups for each theme? i.e:

theme1.domain.com -> theme1.domain.com/theme1/
theme2.domain.com -> theme2.domain.com/theme2/

But I did write that “the same content” and “no duplicated content”, and tell me if I’m wrong but MSM will duplicate channels, content, files etc.

It will only copy content (or anything else) if you want it to and tell it to during the site creation process.

But you can also share content across sites.

You could easily have one “content repository” site that feeds content into other “presentational” sites.

You could also centralize common markup into the central site, and only have unique markup in the presentational sites.

No duplicated stuff. I’m writing now my module for that case. We will see how will this end 😊

Yeah, MSM is exactly what you want for this. No duplicated content. No duplicated templates. We serve 6 sites out of one content repository using MSM.