Two sites sharing same information

Hi all,

Imagine there are two websites, one for US consumption with pricing in dollars, and one for Europe with pricing in Pounds Sterling/Euros.

My question is this - is it possible to have the two websites share the same back-end database which holds both site’s content, except pricing information which will be independently held for each site?

I realise it’s probably a big ask, but I thought I’d enquire. I really like the ideology behind MODx and would love to employ it to create such a project if possible.

Many thanks in advance for your help.

Tony.

Are both sites to be in English?

Would it be good enough to have a single price for each item and convert it to Dollars or Euros on-the-fly before displaying it (this should be fairly easy in MODx although you’d have to update the conversion factor periodically), or do you actually need different prices for each version of the site?

An alternate method would be to quote the price in both Euros and Dollars for each item.

Bob

if it has to be in two seperate domains, you could copy a new modx installation to the second site, but set it to use the first sites database.

Example:
site1 = English Site at domain www.myenglishsite.com (uses database "modx_website")
site2 = Europse Site at domain www.myeurosite.com (uses database "modx_website")

-- STEP 2 --
Then you could create the prices 2 ways:
1) use a TV to put in both english and euro price
2) use a snippet to convert the price automagically (I would go with this* (step 4 explains why))

-- STEP 3 --
Set a default TV in each site
1) English would be dollar
2) European would be euro

-- STEP 4* --
1) set your snippet to get the value
2) and convert to the sitewide TV specified above
3) This way you can duplicate this in the future for additional currencies

-- STEP 5 --
1) On all sites except the master, create a plugin that forwards all manager access to the main/first site
2) This is not necessary but would be profitable in keeping administration straight-forward

So that’s my idea.

Thanks to both of you for replying.

Yes Bob, both sites would be in English, but the US site would be for the company who creates the items being sold and the Europe site would be for their European distributor. Therefore it may not be possible to simply take a figure, convert it to Dollars or Euros on the fly and display the result, since the European distributor may add an extra few % to create a markup... although thinking about it that percentage value could simply be added on the fly too. Hmm, gets me thinking...
I also wonder if there aren’t sites out there that could provide the exchange rate figures which other sites can obtain and use. That way the whole pricing could be automated.

Thanks for the in-depth reply ProWebscape. I am very new to MODx and although I can appreciate what you say I’m not sure I understand it 100%. But if this project were to take off we’d be looking for freelancers to help in the back-end coding work anyway.

Now that I know this could be possible using MODx, I only have a couple of other concerns (apart from convincing both parties that this is the best way forward of course!) Those are hosting and file housekeeping.

I understand that the US parent company host their site themselves on a Windows server, so it’s getting all the necessary technologies in place to allow the MODx site to function. The European distributor’s hosting is far more flexible however, so getting it working shouldn’t be a problem.

I’m also very conscious of file housekeeping on the US site. This is the one that would ultimately create the content that would be shared with the European site, but also the items for sale through both sites would be hosted on the US site - they are downloadable files. I’m just conscious of the fact that the US company has a habit of altering the file names for their products and therefore any links in their site could be broken. This would be of particular concern if - in order to obtain the ideal hosting environment - the US site is moved off the company’s server and on to another. The files would undoubtedly remain on their server because some of them are quite large.
Any further ideas on how to ensure link security?

Thanks again for all your help.

Tony.

Quote from: fluvius at Dec 23, 2007, 08:05 AM

Hmm, gets me thinking...
I also wonder if there aren’t sites out there that could provide the exchange rate figures which other sites can obtain and use. That way the whole pricing could be automated.

http://www.xe.com/dfs/

Cheers,

Jay

Thinking out loud and carrying on from ProWebscapes idea of sharing the database you could:
Have the files in a given directory/directories
Use a snippet which:
1. listed the contents of the directory
2. created/updated the US database with the fields filename, extension, US Price, EU Price etc.
3. run the update as a cron job every so often

This should keep the housekeeping neat and tidy.
Any changes made at the US end would be reflected in Europe.
I have a high traffic MODx site running on IIS, the only slight issue is using ISAPI instead of .htaccess

David

Are you having two sites just for better performance?

It sounds like you could easily have a single site where the user clicked on his or her location and then saw the appropriate prices, ordering info, etc.

Bob

Quote from: BobRay at Dec 23, 2007, 04:37 PM

Are you having two sites just for better performance?

It sounds like you could easily have a single site where the user clicked on his or her location and then saw the appropriate prices, ordering info, etc.

Bob

Not so much for better performance, simply because that’s how things are laid out at present and that’s how the client wants it to continue. I can appreciate your point Bob, and it’s a very valid one, but the European distributor simply wants things to continue as at present; they have a site and the parent company has a site.
Some battles with clients you feel you can win, this one we know we can’t

I’ll release it here for anyone who’s interested

Sounds great, I am interested for sure. I can think of a view applications already.