What is the best practice/approach to programatically sharing content between sites in Joomla?

Question

I've got a client site that will have multiple "mini-sites" for individual web shows and one main site for the company that produces them. Each mini-site has it's own color scheme but has all the same menu items and/or content of the other site such as Photos, News, etc.

I can't seem to figure out how to ensure programatically that the stylesheet I associate with a given mini-site is retained for all interaction within the mini-site, until and unless a user leaves to the HOME page or changes SHOW from the shows menu.

It's possible that I would even use different virtual hosts for the mini-sites, so I want it to feel like they are completely different sites, but rather than maintain multiple instances of the CMS with the same content, they really are powered from one CMS.

I've thought about using JSession to manage sessions, and then grabbing the current mini-site name from session, changing only when a user selects the HOME page, or changes their SHOW from the shows menu. Alternatively I could try to have multiple templates and try to associate them to specific menu items, but that feels a bit ugly.

Does anyone have experience building sites like this in Joomla (or any CMS), and is there a best practice for this?

I think I will have separate sub-menus for each mini-site, so that Photos on each site is a link to a specfic gallery within the photos component, whereas Photos from the main site is a link to the main photo gallery.

Answer 1

I don't really get what you are trying to achieve from your question, but i decipher your question to be

1. You have multiple sites, [SITE A, MenuA, MenuB, MenuC] , [SITE B, MenuA, MenuB, MenuC] , [SITE C, MenuA, MenuB, MenuC].

2.

Each mini-site has it's own color scheme but has all the same menu items

Does this mean Menu A pointing to siteA, menu B pointing to siteB, MenuC pointing to site C, All menus are the same on each site.

1. why not have the same template on multiple sites with Different styles, such that If you have the same template, TemplateA, with styleA on siteA, styleB on siteB and styleC on siteC.

2. And if we are talking about multisites and styles. Are they on the same domain? i.e siteA.yourdomain.com, siteB.yourdomain.com, siteC.yourdomain.com I just learned this from a colleague, apparently you could actually use cookies by posting them to *.yourdomain.com and they will be accessible from all subdomains. Otherwise if the domains are totally differently it won't work for security reason. Something you might want to try

Sorry if i missed it, but maybe an taxonomical scenario will make more sense

Regards!