My car club has begun inviting "chapters/nodes" to our site. To give those members a taste of their old site I've done two things, put those users in a group that I can then trap either in group rights or the theme for certain content like header graphics and blocks. I've also set-up their own host name so they can see their graphics before logging in. They can login using either host name since rights are based on the user name. The multiple hostnames are using the same files and database, not really multi site but I get some control over the look without a large maintenance overhead. It is still a single site and core config.

I used the simple mainfile.php hack to load a unique mainfile config based on the URL used coming in. In that mainfile.php config I set the XOOPS_URL, set the theme ($xoopsConfig['theme_set'] = "xxxxx";), and load a unique /include/common.php file. In that slightly hacked common.php file I set a unique /cache and /templates_c directory. The cache directories are rather important since they need to be independent of the other host name or you will have problems with cached data.

One side effect is that a user could open browser windows to each site and have an independent session on either. That seems to work fine but I'm a little concerned about logging as the same user on both/more sites at the same time. Will I have session problems in the database if multiple sessions as the same user are active? Any other issues I should consider?

not sure what to say about your session question. that's a good one, heh.


nice job tho. if you want to separate each node into more of a site tho, you might want to check out my multisites patch in the XOOPS sf patch tracker. manually patch your files, if you use it, because the patch file isn't quite accurate (was manually edited after the patch file was created)

anyways, using symlinks and my mod, you could have multisites off of a single core install, but each site would have it's own configuration data, and could install it's own modules locally, as well as share modules globally. there's no security checks in place, so i wouldn't give free reign to someone, thinking that all the other sites would be safe.

if you want to go this route, pm me and i'll help ya along, and i'll also give you a copy of my in-action setup (based on 2.0.9 with further changes, whereas the patch is based on 2.0.7.3)