Running subsections of a site through subdomains

Question

Is it possible to run a subsection of a site, a blog for instance, from a subdomain (i.e. blog.mysite.com) and manage it from the same EE Control Panel without the use of MSM?

Answer 1

Yes. Copy the index.php from the main site and update the system path variable, and the following

$assign_to_config['template_group'] = 'your-template-group';
$assign_to_config['template'] = 'your-template';
$assign_to_config['site_index'] = 'http://blog.yoursite.com/';

Answer 2

Another option is having a faux subdomain mapped to a template group in the existing site via .htaccess.

For example:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog.mysite.com [NC]
#whatever exclusions you need for index rewrite:
RewriteCond $1 !^(images|themes|assets|media\/|index\.php|([a-z0-9-]+).html) [NC] 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/blog/$1 [L]

This would need to go before the main site's index.php rewrite in the .htaccess.

Going to blog.mysite.com/category-1 would really be accessing www.mysite.com/blog/category-1

It's likely not the most elegant solution, but I've seen it work well for a mobile site.

Answer 3

Another option is to serve all the domains out of the same set of files. This will point the primary and subdomain at the same file set. Then all you have to do is just check the $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] and set the config variables based on the different subdomains.

Its how I setup a mobile site in EE. Only one set of files, but I just changed a few vars (including template path) and was able to serve up a totally different template set, but using the exact same content, based on the server name.

if($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] == 'm.example.com'){
    $assign_to_config['template_group'] = '';
    $assign_to_config['template'] = '';
    $assign_to_config['site_index'] = '';
    $assign_to_config['site_url'] = 'http://m.example.com/';
    $assign_to_config['site_404'] = '';
}

Answer 4

The old method of running multiple sites still works as of the latest EE 2 release. To use that, you need an index.php for each site and you'd use the assign_to_config values for anything site-specific. For example, I have this setup for one of my subsites (it runs in a subfolder rather than a subdomain, but principle should be the same I believe):

$assign_to_config['template_group'] = '';
$assign_to_config['template'] = '';
$assign_to_config['site_index'] = '';
$assign_to_config['site_url'] = 'http://www.westeros.org/BoD/';
$assign_to_config['site_404'] = '';
$assign_to_config['global_vars'] = array('site' => 'BoD');

I basically just set a default site url to get the right base url for that site and then I define a site variable so that I can have two or more sites sharing my "News" template group, for example.