joomla multiple site content distribution

Question

I'm just starting to evaluate joomla CMS as a tool to build out my personal site. I'd like to manage multiple sites/domains with one copy of joomla on one host. so I'll own mysite.com and myothersite.com, which will both point to the same host/joomla code. If I do this I need to be able to set which domain/site the content I add shows up on. For some sites the content will be on both for others it will be on only one. What would be ideal it to have some kind of filtering mechanism so I don't have to manually set where the content goes.

What would be ideal is for me to set tags on the content and each site can specify which taged content to show.

My last requirement is that I be able to have different pages on each site.

Is this possible or am I asking too much from a "free" CMS?

Thanks all

Answer 1

While there are extensions that will do what you describe (http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/core-enhancements/multiple-sites), Joomla is really designed for one site at a time. I've done setups where I use the same codebase for Joomla and manage it with version control, but I always end up launching multiple sites with individual databases.

However, I don't know of any CMS that inherently allows you to share articles across instances while keeping the data centralized. You may be looking at an extension (or your own customization) regardless of which platform you pick.

Answer 2

I don't know if there's a component that achieves what you're describing here. I use a multi-language component in some of my sites that shows translations, but it doesn't "suppress" articles that doesn't have references to a translation: it just says "No translations to this article". I know you're not asking for translations methods, but I think the Joomfish way of selecting content based in a chosen language would be what you wanted, but not based in languages, just domains.

The only component I know it would be able to suppress articles based in pre defined parameters (in its case the language), is the Joomfish's "Table Localization Plugin", but you need to be a Joomfish silver member paying $60 to Joomfish's developers.

You could write a component(see here for plugin documentation), that analyzing the domain, would suppress articles that shouldn't appear in that specific domain. But I think it's going yo be a lot of work. You would learn a lot of Joomla's architecture, though.

Answer 3

How Joomla displays its content (output) is controlled entirely by parameters. So if you can control what parameters are loading, you can create multiple displays per host

However, that may be overkill in this case. You can just easily hack your template. Just make it load a different menu for siteA and siteB. (The host is set in $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'])

The menu on siteA could have a tagging component item, set to display articles tagged siteA.com. The siteB will have the same for its domain.