Best way to template or theme multiple sites in a single Umbraco installation
Lets say that there is dance organisation called 'Mega Dance'. This dance organisation has many independently run dance clubs across the country sort of like a franchise. There's a guy in London who runs a club called 'Mike's Mega Dance' and there's a woman in Glasgow who's club is called 'Fiona's Mega Dance'.
I'd like a single installation of Umbraco that would contain the websites for the organisation 'Mega Dance' as well as the individual club websites for 'Mike's Mega Dance' and 'Fiona's Mega Dance'.
The main advantage of this is that is will provide a central membership system for the organisation and individual clubs.
All the sites would be very similar and would share the same document types however each site will require its own look and feel.
I wouldn't want a content editor faced with choosing the correct template for their site every time they created a page.
Can the look and feel be tailored to each site without creating site specific templates?
How much will the visual appearance differ on the sites? And how advanced are they going to be? Is the functionality and structure of the sites going to be identical?
Perhaps you can achieve your goal by using 1 set of document types and templates. Simply set a unique site id on the html element like <html id="site1_com"> for instance.
Then in your CSS you can have some general styles, which apply to all the sites and then you can create unique styles for each site using this approach. To make sure you don't load the unique styles for site a on site b etc. you will of course need to make some logic to load the proper themes.
If the sites are more advanced and have different options on the document types then you might need to consider another approach where you have a base document type, which you inherit your properties from for instance and the create a prefix for each frontpage and document doctypes, with a unique template attached so the editor should worry about changing the templates.
I'm looking forward to hear a bit more details from you so we can figure out the best approach in your case.
My idea was that each site could potentially have a completely different look and functionality.
After reading your reply though I realised that this would not really be possible without building quite a complicated architecture behind the site structure.
In practise it is likely that all the sites are going to have a similar feature set and layout. In that case I think your suggestion of simply loading up the correct style sheet for the site is the simplest thing to do.
Best way to template or theme multiple sites in a single Umbraco installation
Lets say that there is dance organisation called 'Mega Dance'.
This dance organisation has many independently run dance clubs across the country sort of like a franchise.
There's a guy in London who runs a club called 'Mike's Mega Dance' and there's a woman in Glasgow who's club is called 'Fiona's Mega Dance'.
I'd like a single installation of Umbraco that would contain the websites for the organisation 'Mega Dance' as well as the individual club websites for 'Mike's Mega Dance' and 'Fiona's Mega Dance'.
The main advantage of this is that is will provide a central membership system for the organisation and individual clubs.
All the sites would be very similar and would share the same document types however each site will require its own look and feel.
I wouldn't want a content editor faced with choosing the correct template for their site every time they created a page.
Can the look and feel be tailored to each site without creating site specific templates?
Regards, Matt
Hi Matt
How much will the visual appearance differ on the sites? And how advanced are they going to be? Is the functionality and structure of the sites going to be identical?
Perhaps you can achieve your goal by using 1 set of document types and templates. Simply set a unique site id on the html element like <html id="site1_com"> for instance.
Then in your CSS you can have some general styles, which apply to all the sites and then you can create unique styles for each site using this approach. To make sure you don't load the unique styles for site a on site b etc. you will of course need to make some logic to load the proper themes.
If the sites are more advanced and have different options on the document types then you might need to consider another approach where you have a base document type, which you inherit your properties from for instance and the create a prefix for each frontpage and document doctypes, with a unique template attached so the editor should worry about changing the templates.
I'm looking forward to hear a bit more details from you so we can figure out the best approach in your case.
/Jan
Thank you Jan,
My idea was that each site could potentially have a completely different look and functionality.
After reading your reply though I realised that this would not really be possible without building quite a complicated architecture behind the site structure.
In practise it is likely that all the sites are going to have a similar feature set and layout. In that case I think your suggestion of simply loading up the correct style sheet for the site is the simplest thing to do.
Regards,
Matt
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