December 27, 2008 - 10:51pm
I'd use OG...
I wouldn't make "separate sites" per se...
I'd use Organic Groups for the individual departments and just theme each section differently... alternately, I think there's a way to theme based on taxonomy terms. You could "tag" each page as belonging to a department and theme theme that way as well. That seems a lot simpler from an administrative POV than actually multi-siteing the different departments.
Blessings
December 28, 2008 - 6:11pm
Any larger ministries using Drupal?
Thanks for the feedback. I love organic groups but in this case it wouldn't be the right fit. It would be nice to find a case study of an organization that required single sign-on between multiple sites. For the most part only larger ministries would require such a feature so as a follow-up question do you know of any larger ministries that use Drupal? There are many big name bands, businesses and universities using Drupal but what about ministries?
December 28, 2008 - 7:43pm
We just did one
We (Mustardseed) just did a larger church site and it's separate youth ministry site (a drupal multisite) which we setup to share the user tables, but use a separate database for everything else. Each ministry even had separate profiles, roles, etc...we just shared the user table, which shared user names, ids, passwords, etc, across sites. It works really well and can be done fairly simply in the settings.php file.
December 29, 2008 - 12:04am
are updates an issue?
Thanks Rob, how do you handle drupal and module updates? If an update requires an update to the database does it mess everything up?
Does this method provide for the ability to login once and then move between the sites without the need to log on again? What advantages led you to this method over other options like Domain Access, CAS, or Open ID?
Looking at options on how best to approach a site using Drupal for a ministry that has several departments and requires the following specs -
-different look for each department
-single sign-on across all sites (I'd prefer to have it where once signed in to one site you could immediately go to a 2nd site for another dept and already be signed in. At the very lease users should have the same login on all sites.
-shared user/profile info across sites would be nice but not required
-shared content across sites would be nice but not required
Here are the options I've come up with
Use Multi-site feature built into Drupal, set it up to share select tables, and add Shared Sign-on module http://drupal.org/project/singlesignon - see http://drupal.org/node/201673
-Domain Access Module http://drupal.org/project/domain + Shared Sign-on module http://drupal.org/project/singlesignon
-CAS Module http://drupal.org/project/cas
-Open ID which is built into Drupal
-Or the easiest options seems to be to just built one site, create a content type and page.tpl.php file for each dept and then allow each dept to only create and edit their content type
Any incite? Anyone had to tackle a similar situation? What did you find to be the pros and cons of the options you considered?
Del
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