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Content Sharing on Drupal Multisites

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As more and more organizations grow their digital presence into online empires, the demand for innovation and efficiency for managing content across a number of websites has never been greater. This ranges from global associations centrally managing content and website functionality for their many local chapters and corresponding digital properties to record labels that run hundreds of artist websites on a single platform. 

If you follow the world of websites and content management, you probably know how critical multi-sites have become for organizations that face these issues. You might also know that Drupal is widely regarded as the CMS that is used to deliver the most robust multi-sites in the world. This includes massive web platforms like of the City of Copenhagen, the National Audubon Society, and Warner Music Group. In many ways, multi-sites are much like a series of roads, leading users on a journey to find connected content that seems stretched across the Internet but actually exists on a unified platform. 

With a multi-site solution, web teams effectively have a network of sites that run on a single unified platform. Each site shares the same code but has a different database. This means that content, configuration, and appearance can be vastly different, yet the code behind it all is consistent and managed centrally. This presents some huge advantages and efficiencies when it comes to managing a portfolio of websites, both for developers and content editors. 

To discuss the wide variety of benefits multi-sites can provide organizations, I have put together a series of blog posts that will delve into the benefits of multi-sites, whether a multi-site solution is right for your organization, and whether a multi-site makes sense for everyone. 


Organizing Content across Different Sites

I’d like to begin our exploration of multi-sites by taking a look at the topic of content sharing with multi-site solutions. Content sharing has been an important topic as multi-site solutions continue to evolve. Different organizations have varying approaches to organizing their content across multiple sites. FFW has worked with some organizations that have what we would consider loose relationships between content across multiple sites. In such a case, each site was managed by a web team that had their own group of editors, which required every group to be responsible for creating and managing content on individual sites. 

However, there are some cases where editors want to use content across different sites. There are several options for how organizations can choose to share content across different sites. Among these options, organizations can choose between pulling individual articles from another website or subscribing to the feed and pulling all the content appearing in that particular feed to their site automatically. 


Content Sharing with Multi-site Solutions

The main goal of multi-site and content sharing solutions is to build a system that is easier for editors to use. This should be simple, where the only action editors need to do to pull the content from its original home and display it on a different site is to copy the URL of the article they want to pull in and paste it to the backend. Everything else is automated. On a technical level, each site provides a metatag with the URL from where the article is imported. That URL is a service call that provides the content is in JSON format, which is easy for the system to parse and run the import. We also use tagging so the content editor is able to specify what tags this content should fall into. Different sites have different sets of taxonomy, and what makes sense for one site might not work for another.

A similar approach has been taken for subscribing to the feed. Each website has pages that list content by terms. When editors want to subscribe to a page, all they have to do is copy the URL of the page, paste it to special form, and specify the tags all content should fall into. 


Models for Content Sharing

When sharing content across multiple sites, organizations can choose between sharing all content or select types of content. Systems can either pull content fully (all images, texts, fields etc.) or pull the teasers only. Visitors can be redirected to the site the content is being pulled from in order to read the full version via the teasers. The decision between these two options depends on what goals the organization wants to meet and is typically made by businesses on a case-by-case basis. Most importantly, organizations must determine how comfortable they feel with content displaying on other sites in its full version, meaning they will not receive visitors on other sites.  

Another interesting situation can occur when displaying teasers.  Let’s say that content X has been created on Site 1. Site 2 is interested in a feed where article X is displayed and subscribes to it. Site 3 pulls the feed from Site 2 where content X displayed. In this situation, it’s important to note that if visitors on site 3 click on content X teaser, they are redirected to Site 1 instead of site 2 since this is where the content was originally created. This is why we always keep the original references. 

When driving visitors of one site to another, it’s also important to ask site owners if they would like to keep the references to the site where content has been seen the first time. During one of our projects, FFW implemented a special block on a site that displayed information where visitors are coming from with the link to that site (page).  This way, we could drive visitors back to original site. 


The Benefits of Multi-site Content Sharing

As you can see, multi-site content sharing has a number of advantages that can be utilized by many corporations, from universities to commercial brands and associations. We’d love to hear from you about how you’ve used multi-site content sharing to grow your business. Feel free to discuss in the comments or reach out to us with any questions.

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About Drupal Sun

Drupal Sun is an Evolving Web project. It allows you to:

  • Do full-text search on all the articles in Drupal Planet (thanks to Apache Solr)
  • Facet based on tags, author, or feed
  • Flip through articles quickly (with j/k or arrow keys) to find what you're interested in
  • View the entire article text inline, or in the context of the site where it was created

See the blog post at Evolving Web

Evolving Web