Sitecore best practices.

Question

We are setting up our first migration to sitecore. We have multiple multi-lingual sites with content stored in database fields with LCID. User controls make database calls to show different language content. we are migrating our content to sitecore items and would like to leverage the sitecore API to get the content from our User controls to build data structures.

I would like to know how to structure visual studio projects for sitecore development in order to use the existing VS soulutions (do we duplicate sitecore dlls and configs to all solutions or share one sitecore installation).

Also how to install the required files in production to support multiple sites which exist as seperate websites in IIS. (Do we have to have duplicate copies of all the required DLLS and config files in a seperate /sitecore folder for each website or we share one folder with virtual folder in each site pointing to the same /sitecore Physical folder)

My apologies for making it a very long post.

Thanks tv

Answer 1

In general we recommend to run everything under 1 IIS website. This saves a lot of configuration and deployment issues. Beside of that, it's not necesarry performance wise to use multiple websites.

Settings up the projects can be done pretty straight forward. Simply make sure the build targets are set towards the /Website/bin-folder of the Sitecore installation. If so, you're able to reuse anything. You can link the Sitecore.Kernel as a Solution Item in Visual Studio.

Overall I think that you should consult your local Sitecore office to think with you setting up this solution. As we're experienced with these kind of migrations, we're happy to give you the right advice and discuss all options.