maintaining multiple sites

answered 2010-09-08 11:41:56 -0500

Evgeny
11329 ● 50 ● 84 ● 183
http://askbot.org/

updated 2010-09-08 13:06:05 -0500

To deploy multiple instances on the same machine - just install askbot (the app itself without the settings.py, etc) - in one place, e.g. in your site-packages, then create multiple deployments (with startforum script).

You do not need multiple copies of askbot code to run many sites on the same machine, but a separate copy for development - is a very good idea.

For multiple sites (each with their own domain) you'll have to use separate databases. In addition, there is no support at this time to run multiple forum instances on the same site (domain). That is you can have two forums cars.example.com and trucks.example.com, but not (at least right now) example.com/cars and example.com/trucks (you can of course have example.com/trucks separately). Is this a significant limitation? What do you think?

Just my opinion - but I think it would be more interesting to develop the forum so that it can support many topics (Yahoo Answers is an example here) rather than have a separate forum for each topic (like Fog Creek does at their Stack Exchange).

From the technical standpoint, having a separate set of tables for each forum sounds like an overkill. Alternatively, you can have a "topic/forum" field in each row to accommodate multiple forums in one set of tables. Are you going to share tags or not? Sometimes you can have a question that fits more than one topic - then if you have separate forums it may become technically difficult to automatically share the question.

My preferred solution though is to use tags in a more advanced way to allow clustering of data into a smaller set of topics. For example there may be a hidden set of special tags, maintained by the moderators.

It would be nice to figure out a practical way to support topic segregation, maybe use some simple solution which can allow progressing towards a more evolved one in the future.