For large organizations, which sell products and services in more than one country, one website is not always enough to grow their brands. But, running more than one website and managing multiple sites can be a daunting task for several businesses. Drupal provides the most effective solution with a Multisite setup.
You can also keep a database and configuration settings separate for each site. Each site can have its own settings, content, enabled theme, and enabled modules. No matter you want your single brand to operate in the global market or spin up your new websites quickly; you can hire Drupal development team and get your custom sub sites ready within shorter time frames.
Setting up your Drupal 8 or 9 website for a multisite environment is not too hard if you’ve team expertise in advanced technical skills. It involves considering the default configuration and then focus on how you can override this config in different ways for each site.
The default config covers content types, fields, vocabularies, enabled modules, views, and other elements that make up the structure of your website. You have to override the config for custom block placement, theme components, and other elements that is particular to that sub site.
The primary element for a multisite setup is its Configuration Split module. With this module, you can keep the default config, override default config, or add custom config to your sub sites. Configuration Split is also used to make a difference between the development stage, the testing stage, and production sites.
Configuration modules offer two types of overrides:
Read on Step by Step Guide to Drupal 7, 8 and 9 migration
If you wanted to have more content-based sites for different departments, but limited with developer and cost, it is ideal to opt for the multisite setup. Drupal supports this traditional way in all its versions. Drupal multisite is well known for its big savings in time, effort, costs, and resources across website development, installation, and management.
The multisite will be a great solution for easier management of all the websites. You can implement multisite set up:
Multisite feature is used to save time on setup. For first time it will take time to build the setup, once the environment is ready; N-number of the site can be deployed with a minimal time of work.
Multisite comes with lots of flexibility to your websites, but it doesn’t mean that there are no pitfalls with this setup.
Drupal occasionally subjects to security susceptibility. If a bug allows unauthorized access to the Drupal core code, the hacker can get access to your entire multisite. Moreover, you might need to reconsider the multisite configuration, in circumstances where the controls of the multisite aren’t run either by the same administrator or a group of people with mutual trust. Because, if anyone who has administrative privilege run an arbitrary PHP code on one site, that code could be used to affect other sites.
Unless you trust your administrators, you need to consider building your sites in separate spaces of your web server, which aren’t feasible to affect each other through PHP scripting.
Multisite can be considered only if you are not planning to introduce serious feature changes to selected sites from your “cluster.” If serious changes are planned, they should apply to all sites. When the functionality of websites is significantly different, it is better to use other approaches instead of multisite.
With Drupal Multisite, you can build lots of websites, which acquire a single config setup, while having the freedom to represent their own thing. If most of your sites are made of static pages, which functions similarly, then a multisite platform could prove a viable option. Embracing the Drupal multisite setup can help you in delivering a faster and better digital experience.