My main reason for using multisite is time. I have 20 domains. If I am
going to keep 20 Drupal sites 'in the green' (core/module status) with
each having their own code base, it's 20x the effort.
On 11/13/2010 11:30 AM, Randy Fay wrote:
My unpopular opinion is that multisite is completely unnecessary for
the vast majority of installs and has major drawbacks. The only
fundamental advantage of multisite is that that it saves some disk
space (does that matter?). But it has fundamental downsides:
* It closely couples the database updates of many sites. (When you
do a module or minor version update, you have to do the update
and test on all the sites at that exact time. If you're doing it
"right" it means that many sites may be offline until you're done.
* It takes your filesystem risk and instead of having one site at
risk at one time, they're all at risk. So if you have a new
module you're introducing or an upgrade that has a bug it
unfortunately affects all sites.
* The files directory has to be managed exactly right; and it
better not be sites/default/files.
IMO, multisite and database prefixing were for the old days before we
had unlimited accounts and disk space was free.
That said, if you know exactly *why* you're doing multisite and you
want to tie sites together, then that's fine. But "because Drupal does
it and it seems cool" is not a good reason.
Aegir is fundamentally a multisite idea, and it deals with all these
problems. It's a maturing approach to doing multisite quite well, and
many people are very happy with it. That's a good reason for doing
multisite, and it has all the issues above dealt with.
-Randy
