We currently have a series of SS2 websites for one client. Each is hosted separately but we are looking to bring them all together to achieve the following:
- Pull records from one site and display on another
- Global search (currently using lucene for some of the projects)
- Global login (something we are looking at implementing down the line)
- Ability to manage all sites from one admin interface
There will be one parent site with each sub site sharing a similar but not identical theme.
The obvious solution would be to use the subsites module but i'm not seeing much recent activity in the forums about it. I was just wondering if/how other developers have gone about this. Have people had good experiences? Is subsites the way to go? Or would we be better off keeping the projects separate and creating some interfaces between them to share data?
The foreseeable issues are:
- One of the existing sites is quite large. Re factoring without affecting the data structure will be tough.
- We use git and a 3 stage development environment. Often we deploy changes to a staging environment where the client fills the site with content before we move the code changes and DB to the live environment. This process can take months. Bringing all the sites together will mean that this workflow holds up all of the subsites as everything has to be deployed at once.
- Project structure. There are going to be a lot of classes so naming conventions and modularisation will be important.
I suppose what I'm really looking for is a "yeah this is possible" or "no you probably shouldn't try merging established sites".
