Alternative to mulitsite?

  • colind

    (@colind)


    12 years, 4 months ago

    I’m trying to build a site for a school in which each classroom teacher has their own blog (or mini-site that includes the blog and some pages). But unlike a standard multisite use, these are all very much related. They’ll share common primary and secondary navigation. I want them all to run the same theme and set of plugins with identical plugin configurations. I’ve just started in and now I’m realizing that multi-site is a real headache for this scenario. Is there a better way to do this? We need a general structure of
    ourschool.com/ ->main site with public-facing marketing stuff
    ourschool.com/community/ ->private school-wide stuff for students, parents, teachers
    ourschool.com/classrooms/first-grade/ ->the blog for first grade (can include pages)

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • dgilmour

    (@dgilmour)

    12 years, 4 months ago

    Multisite is a good fit for this, I’m surprised you think it isn’t.

    You can force all sites to run the same theme either by only installing one theme, or by only making that theme available to all sites. Whether users will be happy with that is another matter, but Multisite will let you create exceptions by granting individual named blogs access to specified additional themes.

    Plugins are shared, and there are plugins to allow centralised control of plugins site-wide.

    To get the URL structure you propose for first grade I think you’d need multiple subfolder installations in /classrooms etc. Flattening out these hierarchies has many advantages, e.g in making it much simpler to display latest activity. I’d try to stick to a single-level name structure. If a few multi-level names were unavoidable, redirects might offer an adequate work-around.

    Thread Starter colind

    (@colind)

    12 years, 4 months ago

    Awesome. I was mostly looking for some confirmation. I found plugin called YD Network-wide options which appears to propagate plugin settings across the network. Anyone have any experience with it or something similar?

    And does anyone have any suggestions about how best to achieve common menus across the site? I think I can do the basic top nav just by switching to blog 1 in index.php and getting it’s menu by ID. I found another YD plugin that generates a list of all the blogs in the network. I may swipe that for inspiration at least since that will, presumably, dynamically generate a list of all the active blogs on the network. Any other recommendations?

    Thanks,
    Colin

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • The topic ‘Alternative to mulitsite?’ is closed to new replies.