Large data set to be shared to multiple sites

Well – I had searched the forums high and low, and looked at many plugins.

The solution was to share the same data across multiple domain names actually is not too complex.

On cPanel it was about adding each new domain as an addon domain, which pointed to the /public_html (or main website root dir).
Then to set the site up in a normal multisite install.
When setting the multisite up in network admin, there was a config change needed (*):
– add the sub site with it’s subdomain name (ie, site1.example.com)
– * once the sub site is added, go back and edit the domain field, and put in the main domain name (ie http://www.example.com)
– go to settings->domains and create the sub site

In the theme of the subsite, the following code is the most crucial part, and is what redefines which tables wordpress will reference when producing content. This code needs to go into the functions.php file of the theme.

function table_prefix_switch() {
	global $wpdb;
	$wpdb->p2p = 'wp_p2p';
	$wpdb->p2pmeta = 'wp_p2pmeta';
	$wpdb->postmeta = 'wp_postmeta';
	$wpdb->posts = 'wp_posts';
	$wpdb->terms = 'wp_terms';
	$wpdb->term_relationships = 'wp_term_relationships';
	$wpdb->term_taxonomy = 'wp_term_taxonomy';
}
add_action('init', 'table_prefix_switch');

One significant thing of note is that you cannot use the basic menu functions for creating menus, (as this is stored in the taxonomy tables), you need to create multiple menus, and use menu locations to define specific menus for each sub-site.

That is essence the basics of what we have done.

The original scope we had was to use a common database, and share the data across multiple domains, some of the domains required the data to also be filtered. We did the filtering using site specific options, and then filtering content using pre_get_posts and join_posts.

The sites have been up a few weeks now, and the only things to be sorted are how to create sitemaps on sites which we have filtered data (about 35-40 of them), and collation of stats – which we have been trialling a couple of plugins.

Cheers,

V