What is the preferred way to reconcile multiple Default Page(s)?

Question

Here's the problem: we have a family (approx. 8) of websites, each hosted on a different subdomain of a single domain common to every member of the family. E.g.,

ecommerce.my_domain.com
forums.my_domain.com
signup.my_domain.com

For various reasons, each subdomain is administered separately from the others--i.e., different servers, complete autonomously with respect to the others regarding nearly every development decision, including choice of web framework--for instance., two are Django, one is Zend, and so on (though all run Apache 2.2). We want to fix this, and someday we will, it just won't be anytime soon.

One direct consequence of this structure is that we have multiple Default page names. By 'Default Page' i'm referring to the page the server defaults to when no page on the subdomain is given--sometimes it's 'index.html', sometimes 'index.php', etc. (I know what they are, it's the fact that there are multiple pages that's a problem.)

(The Default page is the webpage to which your server defaults when no page on the domain is specified. For example, if the "index.html" page is served when you enter "www.my_domain.com", "index.html" is the Default page.)

Here's one problem it causes: our analytics code (javascript) will count page views to subdomain1.my_domain.com and subdomain1.my_domain.com/index.html as two separate pages, unless the correct default page is specified.By itself, this can cause a two-fold error in the basic page view measurement. In addition, the analytics system (Google Analytics) only allows a single Default Page to be specified.

After looking into this, it seems one way to do is at the Server (Apache 2.2) : (i) create a CGI directory without using ScriptAlias; (ii) use DirectoryIndex to specify a default document when only the directory is requested.

i suppose this can also be done within the Web Framework that supports each subdomain property, though given we have multiple different frameworks, that option is certainly less appealing.

I would be grateful for the Community's view on the preferred way to do this.

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Answer 1

What about using a .htaccess file to handle it?

Just add a line resembling the following with the order you want it to look for files to be your default:

DirectoryIndex index.html default.php default.htm foo.html index.cgi

.htaccess reference docs: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/howto/htaccess.html