Creating a different "genre" of my website (i.e., I have a stackoverflow-equivalent and I want to create a serverfault-equivalent)

Question

My site, Rap Genius, explains rap lyrics. I want to create a new site, Rock Genius, that explains rock lyrics – otherwise it'll be the same (same layout, same DB schema; like Serverfault is to Stackoverflow)

What's the best way to do this?

Approach 1: Fork the code

Fork the Rap Genius code, change the relevant parts (e.g., "Rap" -> "Rock"), create a new database and go to town.

• Pros: Can get it working quickly
• Cons: It'll be somewhat painful to add a feature to both applications. Also it'll be impossible to give Rap Genius access to Rock Genius' data at the DB level

Approach 2: Keep it a single application

Whenever a request comes into my application, check the domain. If it's rapgenius.com, set the SITE_NAME constant to "rapgenius". Create a genre field on user-facing entities (songs, blog posts, etc) and update my queries to use the correct genre based on the SITE_NAME

Create a layer of abstraction above user-facing strings to that I can write <%= welcome_message %> instead of Welcome to Rap Genius! and have welcome_message() take SITE_NAME into account

• Pros: Lots of flexibility
• Cons: Lots of work!

Thoughts?

Answer 1

The second approach sounds better to me.

You've already highlighted the main pros and cons - it will definitely be more work, but will be much friendlier to maintain. Is there any chance of a third, fourth, fifth site? If so, there's no question that this is the right way to go.

You'll likely also be able to share user accounts, reputation, and any other kind of community based functionality more easily.

It might be worth looking at Rails i18n stuff for 'translating' static text, based on the domain name. That way you could avoid writing helper methods for every string you want to display.

Then you should be able to 'franchise' the site really easily - add translations of static strings, a handle for the new domain, and maybe some site specific images or CSS and you're done!