Deploying multiple vanilla forums

posabsolute · January 2011

Hi guys,

I got a project where I need to deploy multiple forums, on one platform.

I was wondering if it was possible to keep 1 codebase, with multiple databases, and themes for each forums,

And if you guys could give me a couple of pointers to achieve this,

Thanks!

CodeWarrior · January 2011

I came here to ask the very same question. Would be interested in the answer to this also. Thanks.

posabsolute · January 2011

:/

Tim · January 2011

Depending on your OS, you can use symlinks to create multiple references to a single codebase.

codegrunt · January 2011

@posabsolute @CodeWarrior

If there is something set in the environment variables that you can key on to denote which site you are currently using (a sanitized version of $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] perhaps) you can probably change bootstrap.php so that custom paths are used for "PATH_CONF", "PATH_CACHE" and "PATH_THEMES". You would also need to make sure that each site's config.php and constants.php reflect the site specific settings.

One gotcha however is that upgrading would be a pain in that you would have to run the process for each site individually (since they have a unique database) and you would have to look at the actual upgrade scripts to see if anything needs to be adjusted to account for the unique paths. I think you would be OK as far as the web user permissions go since only the localized directories / files need to be accessed by the PHP instance.

Cheers

CodeWarrior · January 2011

I tried changing the paths with only partial success - some CSS and JS files located in application were wrongly referenced.

I don't see upgrading as a gotcha, in fact that's one of the main reasons to share a central codebase among forums - you only need to update the files in one place.

I'm actually surprised this isn't more straight forward since I thought that was the whole point of building a framework around vanilla and making it modular!