Letting several Pages share the same URI?

Question

I run multiple sites off one EE installation using the old method, and one issue with that is the Pages module. For example, I need an About Page for each site, directly following the domain. That means that when I setup these Pages, the Page URI would be /About/ in both cases.

This does not work (which the documentation does make clear), even if the Page content is stored in two separate channels and even if each uses a separate Template.

My question, then, is if there's any work-around for this issue? For example, each of my sites does have a site variable defined in index.php. Would it be plausible to use that in any way to allow multiple Pages to share the same URI.

Answer 1

I do this with one website with the following setup: Both domains point to the same directory
(second.com is a ServerAlias for main.com)

in the main domain .htaccess redirects requests for second.com to a subdirectory "other"

### second.com to directory
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} second.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(other)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(jpe?g|js|gif|png|xml|swf|bmp|css|pdf)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ other/$1 [L]

### all requests to EE index.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(jpe?g|js|gif|png|bmp|swf|xml|css|html?|pdf)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [L]

in the "other" directory the htaccess redirects to a 'hard' template group

### Allow some of the 'real' template groups
RewriteCond $1 ^(specialgroup|sometemplategroup)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [L]

### All others go to hardcoded template group other/$1
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(jpe?g|js|gif|png|bmp|xml|css|html?|swf|pdf)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/other/$1 [L]

In the index.php for the subdirectory, setup some config variables

$assign_to_config['template_group'] = 'other';
$assign_to_config['template']       = 'welcome';
$assign_to_config['site_404']       = 'other/404';

$assign_to_config['site_name']  = 'My Other Site';
$assign_to_config['site_url']   = 'http://second.com/';

To be able to actually use the "site_name" and for it to work, you need to hack the core https://support.ellislab.com/bugs/detail/15461/#8283
or install an extension i developed for this.
http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/override_site_name

1. internally the 'real' segments will be second.com/other/about
   while the browser only shows second.com/about

2. the "allow some real template groups" part, allows to show member pages or 'real' template groups like the /specialgroup or /members without prepending other to the url.

3. all assets (images, pdf, css, etc) still come from the main directory. The subdirectory 'other' only has an .htaccess and the index.php file in there.

Answer 2

Wouldn't a template setup as "about" fix this?

Answer 3

This is a perfect example of where using MSM would make your setup so much easier to manage then the old method as Pages URI's are site dependent so you could have multiple /about/ segments and similar on a per site basis.

Answer 4

I'm not sure if you're too far into this site to entertain using Structure, but it's easy to accomplish this with Structure. Your Structure URLs are stored separately from URL Titles. Initially, the Structure URL field copies the URL Title field, but you can then edit it to be any unique URL within its parent page/entry.