And another good reason for using DruPal over other CMS systems and blogging tools

Today:

Implementing multiple sites with one Drupal installation

Simple and straightforward:

- install one Drupal file setup
– install one or more Drupal databases

( or share the databases partially – e.g. have same user login data across all sties)

– then setup different sites on different domains

You can use this to build a whole network of sites, but still maintaining only one installation.

This multi-site setup worked in DruPal 4.6 and of course does in Drupal 4.7

Be sure to checkout the best page to start reading and learning on Drupal multi-site setup

But beware of the ugly drupal cache bug I found….

I already setup an installation of Drupal 4.6 on

1) http://www.marketingfan.com

and a differnet site-entry at

2) http://tools.marketingfan.com

The setup for 2) only contains an entry

'site_frontpage' => 'free-seo-tools' to direct visitors directly to a page where various tools are listed… all the other navigation elements should point back to the www. setup (1)

Therefore all the mysql tables are shared, the only difference are these few settings in the Array = array( ... section for directing visitors to the specific page

The bug: as soon as I enable the cache in the drupal settings, the same page gets delivered for the root page for both sites, which seems to mean that the request-url is not stored in the cache hash key of drupal…

Therefore I had to disable caching for now… I don't know if this is fixed in 4.7 but will let you know….

Of course this problem DOES NOT occur if you don't share the whole database… I assue at least the caching-tables should be separarted