Best way to maintain and develop 3 similar sites

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Best way to maintain and develop 3 similar sites

It would kind of be like S[OFU] except there will be more differences between the site.

What are good ways to develop 3 site at once with a different look and different functionality? I believe with the look i may only change the CSS and some backend data for different categories. I also need some functionality and options to be specific to one or two but not all sites.

Whats the easiest way to develop, maintain and test the sites during the development process? I am hoping something simple like changing the root directory in the visual studio IDE can be enough and have site specific features enabled through config files in the site specific root directory.

+2 A:

You might want to consider developing in a somewhat modular manner. That way, common elements can be shared between the sites completely (just 2 deployments of the same code), while elements that vary are their own independent modules.

Amber 2009-12-31 08:24:44

Are you saying have 3 project files, a shared source section and a section with site specific modules? Build them each separately? (Shared source files are not copies but all point to original)?

acidzombie24 2009-12-31 08:27:43

Sure, that would be one way to do it. The idea is that you want to minimize how much "copy-pasting" between projects you have do to for stuff that's exactly the same; and also separate the parts that are different so that they don't lead to more complicated logic in unrelated elements.

Amber 2009-12-31 22:08:11

alright. i sat down here and thought about it. It sounds good to me. It doesnt sound like your saying not to use a config file to enable/disable features but that it may be simpler to have a separate module instead. That sounds good. I had no reason to use enabling config files in the first place. I just like the idea of a single build. Accepted!

acidzombie24 2010-01-01 22:15:28

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Best way to maintain and develop 3 similar sites

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