Here's a puzzler: I'm doing a site for a client that starts with a landing page that links to his four law offices, each with a color coded header and office info. They all have content specific to their offices, no problem. But they also have some content that's universal, like a blog. How do I put the blog in for all the offices but preserve the office info on those pages? No, I do not want to use frames, but yes, that's the idea I'm talking about.
Couple different ways you could approach this, generally depending on how much information you need to share across the offices, whether you have requirements on how these different offices are administered, and generally how similar the content is.
The first decision to make is whether to use Single Site setup (in which they technically operate as one WP site), or a Multi-Site setup (in which you could use one common theme, but the posts/pages are administered independently - you could still use a plugin like http://wordpress.org/plugins/network-latest-posts/ to share blog posts, but you'd want to make sure it meets your needs beforehand). More on this decision here: http://mashable.com/2012/07/26/beginner-guide-wordpress-multisite/, and setup here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network.
If you opted to go single-site, then one simple option may be to create page hierarchies, with the parent-level pages as Office A, Office B, Office C. If it's only a couple things that need to change based on the office (e.g. header colors, simple branding or info), then you could make a function that checks highest parent-level page (using get_post_ancestors - http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_post_ancestors), and use that result to determine which offices' branding you should use.
Best of luck!
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I'm building a new website in WordPress with Divi.
Now I'm at the taxonomy point in which I need to make a decision on how to implement different pages such as blogs, services, cases and resources.
My question:
What is the most effective and scalable way to add these subjects in order for me to not change every single page when I want to make one adjustment to the layout without making changes in the back-end?
I figured maybe I could create categories in the posts section of WordPress and maybe work with dynamic content pieces, but haven't found anything useful on the internet about that.
My assumption is that it shouldn't be that hard since a lot of websites have these subjects with tons of pages in which I don't believe they adjust every single page by making a slight change in a specific subjects page layout.
Help would be greatly appreciated!
I am developing a multi-country and multi-lingual website using Drupal. I am relatively new to Drupal (this is my first project on it).
My client will have multiple country sites (www.example.com/uk/, www.example.com/bg/, www.example.com/fr). What i need is to be able to tag content to a particular country in Drupal and to also have that content then appear on the relevant site. A use case is below:
The user creates a page called about and tags it to the country Bulgaria (bg). They then navigate to www.example.com/bg/about, to view the page.
I am also using the Multilingual - Internationalization module (Link to module). So on top of the above the user will also tag content to a particular language. A use case is below:
The user creates a page called about and tags it to the country Bulgaria (bg), they also select the language as being English. They then navigate to www.example.com/bg/uk/about, to view this page.
I have tried many modules etc but to no avail so far. Some things to bare in mind below:
This is based on a Drupal 7 install on a local server
There is no scope to change the URL structure
www.example.com will be their primary groups website which will link through to the international versions
Any guidance or solutions is much appreciated.
I think it may make sense to try using the Organic Groups module to create the 'multi-site' aspect of this. It'll give you more separated sites than tagging alone.
You can make all your groups (countries) be global (in the organic groups default scenario, groups can either be globally visible or visible only to their members). Then when one of your editors is creating a page, they'd have to select which group that page should belong to, rather than use a tag to segregate country-specific content.
Groups are a good solution, I think, because then, each group (country) can have its own independent menus, using the og_menu module, so you can really set them up to look like their own independent little sites.
Once that's set up (and it will take you a while, because there's a steep learning curve with using Organic Groups), you can do the translations independently of which group a page exists in. I'm assuming the translation stuff is working fairly well with the Multilingual - Internationalization module.
If you use the pathauto module, you can set up your url rules to automatically behave the way you want (i.e. with bg for the 'Bulgaria' group, etc). I actually don't have that setup for my site using Organic Groups, but there are various discussions on how to do that, and I'm just citing one of them here: https://drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/36892/organic-groups-group-content-types-and-pathauto
I hope this helps a little....
We're looking in to a product that we would like to launch that gives small business owners (specifically offline shop owners) the chance to easily build a site.
A option would be a special 'fork' of wordpress/joomla/etc with some predefined pages (about us, homepage, opening times, pictures, contact etc) and also predefined templates which they can alter.
A shop owner would sign up and buy or move a domain to us to which we attach the software. He chooses a template and fills in the standard info. Some elements of this are required but he could also add his own pages (e.g. specific sale events).
Within the templates there are elements which he cannot change (backlinks and/or widgets from us). But he can change the templates (colors, pictures, logos).
Everything should be hosted in the cloud (e.g. EC2) and easily scalable. We would sell this service for a small fee per month giving a small shop owner an easy way to his own site.
Are there any open-source packages that have these options?
Joomla isn't very flexible to adjust,
Wordpress is a better choice.
the build in twentyeleven theme will show you how easy it can be to adjust colors.
It's also far easier for the user to manage.
You might even take a look at a WP-multisite. Manage all sites with one admin. And keep all your wp sites up to date at once.
To disable some widgets you only need a good template.
Robert suggests magento and shopify, Magento will be too much and to hard to manage. I'm not familiar with shopyfy, but it's a online shop (not offline)
Form this question I take that you/your company is a startup and you don't have much experience.(As does a quick google)
What ever you take you will need (more then basic) coding knowledge php/html/css/javascript
Might be worth having a look at http://www.magentocommerce.com/ or http://www.shopify.com
I just want some opinions on what's the best way to go about meeting the following requirements.
I have
One main Drupal Installation
It is a typical "listings" site where users can list items
One user can have how many ever "listings" that are linked to his account
I want to be able to create sub-accounts, that use the same base site. However, for each subsite:
Only the users listings must appear on his site
It must have a completely different theme.
It must have its own menu items
The site must run off it's own domain OR subdomain
I need some answers:
Is this possible, or will each user need a completely new Drupal installation and just use a web service or something to get its listings from the main site?
What modules / components will make my life easier?
Any other suggestions to make this as simple as possible?
The problem description is not detailed enough to give a fully sound advice (and - additionally - it looks like you could probably get better advice on a drupal specific forum, as the question seems more related to installation and configuration than to programming), however - from what I understand - it looks to me that your solution could give in either of the two directions:
Tweaking a single installation to appear as different sites
Creating multiple sites that shares the same codebase and part of the data
The tweaking solution has the advantage that you have only one DB to mantain, but there is no actual real separation between the subsites. You could implement this by:
SUBSITES: mapping various subdomains on the same IP
CONTENT: using the native permission system to filter which list items to display (for example: each logged user can display only nodes created by himself, or set to be visible to its role, or having as associated taxonomy term its username...)
THEMES : if subsites will be used only by logged-in users, use the same mechanism that you would use for filtering content [each user can natively pick a different theme if you allow them to], if they must appear with a different look also to anonymous users, then use the URI to pick up the appropriate theme (if visitor X reaches the site via user1.example.com the site will have the blue theme, whilst if the URI is user2.example.com the theme will be pink).
The multiple sites solution has the advantage that you have a real separation between subsites (with even a different DB). But you would then have to either sync or transfer "on the fly" data between the main site and the subsites. If you go for this solution, you should probably take a look at the following links:
the services module, which allows to easy set up webservices
this page explaining how to connect drupal to different databases (surely faster than using webservices... reasonable solution if you for example have sites and subsites running on the same server)
I didn't want to stick this in a small comment but I am in agreement with mac on many of his points (upvote!).
The best way would be to create your subdomains and have them be symbolic links in the site folder to the default / main-domain folder.
Given what you have told us, you are much better off creating a module that creates its own node types (or even just CCK) and use a combination of the permission system (CCK offers this as well through content_permission), Views, etc. No need for separate sites, just need users to look at their own content.
The beauty of this approach is you can use Flag to allow user's to friend each other, use Views to allow them to see friend's lists, etc.
Theme's can be set on the account level, so no issues there.
"Have their own men" - does this mean have their own block on the sidebar or header than has customized links or a completely different menu SYSTEM? Will need clarification before I can answer that.
Currently I have to think of a solution for generating and maintaining lots of static landing pages for a membership-only e-commerce site (e.g. we sell products X, Y and Z but only to our members and we want to make a (SEO-friendly) landing pages for each product). Each page would be almost unique in content and the meta data but they would have almost always the same design / template.
The easiest approach short-term would be to code everything by hand in PHP, but the quantity would make it really cumbersome to maintain them; furthermore, it is possible that some people from the marketing department would like to generate and administer their own landing pages, none of them are tech-versed (not even basic html-tags). Therefore, I was thinking of using Wordpress and modifying it for my purposes.
Is this a good idea?
Is there a CMS better suited for this task?
Could you recommend me a better approach?
I would not recommend wordpress for an e-commerce site, as it designed primarily to be a blog and therefore would not be particularly easy to adapt.
You may want to look at OScommerce, or another open source e-commerce CMS. These would probably best suit your needs, especially if you wish to actually accept payment online.
PHP is a GREAT way to maintain what you are trying to do. Essentially you said only the content will change. With PHP, you can simply include all of the templates for re-use over and over again, and then you only need to deal with the content itself, which, if you know how to use Server-Side-Includes, can be done by as easily as swapping .txt files that contain your content.
Take a look at this video tutorial http://carsonified.com/blog/design/how-to-design-a-portfolio-site-part-2/, it is not exactly the same thing but look how he uses Wordpress 'customs fields'.
Basically, you create a template landing page with placeholder variables for the parts that change with each page (title, product name, etc.) and then on the post page you can add custom fields that will populate that information.