Jon Wright Design

Multiple Site Manager - First Impressions

Regular readers of my occasional articles may have noticed my gradual rejection of the Joomla Content Management System in favour of ExpressionEngine, an extremely powerful paid alternative and in my opinion well worth the money.

Jonwrightdesign.co.uk was the first site I decided to take the plunge and develop with ExpressionEngine (EE), I spent an intense couple of weeks downloading video tutorials, ploughing through every forum post and article I could find on the subject and generally make my head hurt with new information.

It was worth it.

For me, the one killer feature that reeled me in was that you designed the whole ‘back end’ of a website yourself. You code the pages how you want them to look from the very beginning, not having to tackle convoluted template systems just to change the slightest thing.

As someone who is inclined much more towards the visual design of the a website than learning programming languages this was a godsend. Enabling me to offer my clients hugely powerful and extensible websites.

Once Jonwrightdesign.co.uk had been ticking along nicely for a few months, I began to toy with the idea of migrating my two other websites, Jonparadisemusic.com and Myhotelonline.co.uk to EE too.

It was at this point I discovered a paid-for extension for EE called Multiple Site Manager (MSM).

Once installed from within your website, it enables the creation of new websites based on the same Expression Engine install.

To create a new site, I simply created a sub-folder at the root of my current website directory, popped a couple of files in there to ‘link’ my new website with EE, visited my EE Control Panel and selected the new ‘Sites’ tab to create my new website.

From there the setup the new website is pretty well the same as any other installation of ExpressionEngine (when first creating the site you do have options of duplicating or importing your existing site, which can save a lot of time if the new site is to have a similar structure).

Once the new site is set up is where the magic really starts.

The power of Multiple Site Manager is that it shares Extensions, Plugins, Modules and Weblogs between websites. Each Extension, Plugin and Module can have it’s own settings per website (it’s worth checking whether they support MSM though, most do, but if the add-on is vital to your site, make sure first).

It’s simple to display weblogs ‘cross-site’ in MSM, you simply add the “site” parameter to the opening weblog tag.

{exp:weblog:entries weblog=“my_weblog” orderby=“date” limit=“10” site=”Site_A”}

The simple addition of the “site” parameter tells ExpressionEngine that the weblog information is to be pulled and displayed from the weblog created in ‘Site_A’ to ‘Site_B’.

This parameter only controls the information displayed on the page, the style sheets and template of the weblog are totally separate.

It is also possible to add the usual Comment Form Tags to the weblog on the ‘Site_B’, and those comments will be linked in and display on ‘Site_A’.

A wonderful system.

My only problem has been when sharing Categories across sites. From what I gather it can’t be done. For instance I wanted to display all articles from Jonparadisemusic.com on Jonwrightdesign.co.uk under the category ‘Music’.

After much swearing and a few forums posts it seems it is not possible at this point.

The long awaited ExpressionEngine 2 is due out sometime later this year which the developers promise has huge changes. Maybe this issue will be solved then.

All in all, Multiple Site Manager is a must for any ExpressionEngine developer who wants to share information between their websites.

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