Hi Forum!
I’m using MODx to build many sites with similar layout and it got very tedious to install MODx every time and add on all my items and settings. So I have experimented with a way to get all my own standard settings (all the ones in Tools - Configuration), users and all their settings (same manager users for all my sites), templates, TV’s modules, snippets, chunks etcetera. Got some questions here if anyone has any clues.
First - I created a "standard" site with all my settings, chunks etc and a standard main index.html page, all different javascript files, CSS, xml etc. Much like the normal MODx installation, only with all my special add-ons. I also uploaded a few typical images (logo.jpg etc) to assets/images (to be modified later).
Then, I used MODBAK to backup this site.
From the backup zipfile, I took the database SQL query file (the db backup) and edited this to a more standard form with instructions in the beginning what to change for each new site later.
Finally, to create a "standard" start-site, I use the normal MODx installation, then I simply drop all the tables from the database and re-create them using the SQL backup query (now modified for this particular site).
This saves a lot of time but there are some minor quirks.
There is a variable called site_id, it is read into the SQL database like this:
INSERT INTO `modx-site-nnn_system_settings` VALUES (’site_id’,’nnnnnnnnnnnnn’);
The ID appears to be a 13 digit hex number and it seems to differ between my sites. I haven’t found any reference to this in the settings anywhere in the manager interface so I have no clue what it does. The problem is of course that the number here will come from the simple standard-site I first created but I suppose it should really be a new unique number for each site.
So - any clues here? Can I just omit it - maybe MODx will then create a site_id in that case, or should I set it to some random 13-digit hex number (maybe all zeroes?)? What does the site_id actually do? Maybe I could get the site_ID from the database just after the MODx install, before dropping the whole database - but I would like to make things as simple as possible so omitting this step would be nice.
Currently, I have a few sites (still only on template stage, haven’t started to build on them yet) all with the same site_id, will this mess up something (they are hosted in the same place)?
Does anyone think there is something else I might have overlooked in this approach, something that might mess things up later?
