Hi All,
Brand new to modx, and I have a ’will it work for me’ style question. I’ve done a bit of searching and have found a few gems of information which have been really useful, but before I go too much further I could use some tips / advice. I’ve come to modx from using Joomla and Silverstripe, mostly because I don’t think either of them will do what I need. I’m a reasonably experienced PHP / MySQL developer, so I’m happy to get my hands dirty if snippets, plugins are needed to make this work..
Here’s the project...
I have to set up a suite of websites, all using the same basic layout and site tree. The main site is the manufacturer of a product, so it contains some corporate information, product range, contact info, etc... all pretty basic stuff.
Sitting beside this are a number of distributor websites. They share the same basic structure, (i.e. corporate, products, etc.) Some of these sites need to support multi-lingual content.
I’ve got my head around using contexts to handle the multiple sites, and I’ve found a few ’howtos’ for the multi-language stuff which all seem to make sense.
Now, the thing I’m struggling with particularly is this... there is a lot of common data on the sites (e.g. the product range) and there are some areas which differ (e.g. the corporate bits). So what I’d like to be able to do is effectively have a common site tree for every domain, but ’reverse-inherit’ the content for it.
i.e. If a visitor requests www.domain1.com/products or www.domain2.com/products or www.domain3.com/products they would see the same content (delivered in the relevant template for the context)
but,
if a visitor requests www.domain1.com/aboutus they would see different content to www.domain2.com/aboutus and so on..
(Hopefully that makes sense)
Now, currently there is a system in place using a lot of static template / content files which runs through PHP. The scripts check to find the most specific version of a given page and deliver that... starting at site-specific level, then looking up to the ’default’ set for the content if nothing is found.
I guess I’m wondering if content can be common to multiple sites, delivered through specific contexts on demand. If it can, then I imagine I’ll need to write a plugin to look and see what’s available. I’m not looking for someone to give me the whole solution (unless you want to of course !) but any pointers would be greatly appreciated.
OK.. enough waffling. Will modx do what I need, or am I faced with a custom-code project ?
Cheers
hmm... the more I look at it, the more I think I might be able to do what I want using Symlinks. If I can get the multi-language stuff working properly across the various contexts... there might be a new modx evangelist on the prowl !
To my knowledge, at present symlinks don’t work across contexts, however Opengeek is hoping to address this for the 2.1 release.
Hope this helps.
DM
How about sharing Chunks?
