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• Drupal Multisites: When to deploy

  • Author: leviait
  • Category: Drupal
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  Multisites is a deployed Drupal environment that allows sharing of components, but also maintains site individuality.  Perfect for organizations with a couple of sites that have unique content, but are similar or even identical in functionality. The benefits include the following:

  • Some code components are shared
  • Designs can be completely unique
  • Content is unique to each site
  • Overall development time can be decreased by implementing in series
  • Economies of scale are acquired on subsequent deploys

  The Multisite install would not make sense if:

  • The functionality of websites is very different from one another
  • The design of one of the websites depends on a custom module that is not very popular since it could hold back the update process of other sites in the install

  Security Concerns

  • You might want to reconsider using Drupal’s multi-site configuration in situations where the administrators for all of the sites being run from the same code base are not either the same person or a small group with a high level of mutual trust. The reason is that anyone with full administrative privileges on a Drupal site can execute arbitrary PHP code on that site through various means (even without FTP access to the site), and that arbitrary PHP code could be used from one site to affect another site, if the two sites are in the same HTTP document root and sharing the same Drupal code.

  So, unless you completely trust all of the administrators of the sites you are considering running from the same Drupal code base to be knowledgeable, careful, and not malicious, you might want to consider installing their Drupal sites in completely separate areas of the web server that are not able to affect each other via PHP scripting.

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