Advice on making an Elgg site "multi site"

We launched an Elgg website this year for a client. They would now like to expand this site to multiple communities. For example, their current Elgg site could be referred to as:

city1.socialnetwork.com

They would not like to launch city2.socialnetwork.com and city3.socialnetwork.com. Each network is different, and would have different groups, message boards, events, etc. Each user would have a home base network like city1 or city2, but the registered users would be able to stay logged in and move from city to city.

Any ideas or advice on the best way to handle this? I have been searching and I see that the Elgg feature list states: Multiple sites (or applications) per installation (coming soon)

I found MP’s Multisite Elgg: http://www.marcus-povey.co.uk/2010/04/19/multiple-site-support-elgg/

I also found references to a plugin to make an exiting Elgg mult-network, but it seems like it may be outdated.

BTW: this is all built on Elgg 1.7.7.

Thanks in advance for your recommendations.

  • Marcus' multisite solution work perfectly with the 1.7 branch. The idea is to have the same codebase but different databases for multiple sites. The multisite solution will take care of this requirements: "Each network is different, and would have different groups, message boards, events, etc."

    For the other part, enabling single registration / single sign-on among multiple sites under a "multisite" installation, I'm afraid you'll have to do some custom development. Just an idea, but probably simplest way would be to use Elgg's RESTful API to do authentication accross multiple sites.

  • Thanks, Andras.

    Correction, it is not just the code base I wish to share, but also a single database (similar to how WordPress multisite works). This way I can easily combine river streams and co-mingle data if a user joins groups from different sites and wants to see updates from all of them on a single page.

     

  • Hi,

    We also have a similar requirement, where there will be elgg installed on different machines(i.e. different sites) and need to use single database to save the data updated by each of the sites. Is there any way in Elgg 1.8 to achieve this?

    Thanks,

    Ryan

  • thanks DhrupDeScoop for the suggestion, this plugin do allow creation of multiple different sites.

    My appology, as I previously forgot to mention that that the data of one site should be mutually exclusive to other site.

    for e.g I have two sites site1, site2.

    now there will be some users user_a, user_b, etc on site1. and users user_x, user_y, etc on site2. the updates in site1(blogs, activities) should not be visible to users on site2 and vice versa, but the data should reside in same database(tables)

    I tried exploring the plugin but did not find any way to do it. Is this possible in elgg?

    thanks,

    Ryan