Multiple Site Manager with Unique Membership per Site
Development and Programming
I am looking into using Multiple Site Manager (MSM) for a project, so that I can share certain common elements (templates and channels). This is going to save us a lot of work. However, each website needs distinct membership access.
For instance, “John Doe” might be a member of the “red” website, but not the “blue” website. I have read the MSM documentation (http://expressionengine.com/downloads/details/multiple_site_manager/), and shared member groups seems to not only be a feature, but a requirement.
I recognize that I must create a member group for each site (i.e. - “red site members” and “blue site members”), but does anyone have a suggestion on how to limit access per site to the corresponding group (“red site” only allows access for “red members”)?
I’m grateful for any ideas… thanks!
Tim
Access can be set at the template level - just configure each template in the Red site to only be available to the Red group, etc.
In practice you need to have three membership categories: blue, red, and redblue. Those belonging to red and redblue (dual members) have access to the red site.
Thanks for the replies. Setting access in the templates occurred to me as well, but it is an important goal for the websites to share common templates (the UI requirements for the websites dictate this). So, setting the member group access in a template shared among various websites with unique permissions doesn’t get me what I need.
I wonder if I will just need to make a common reference to a site-specific permission setting within the shared template. So the single template used on all the websites will look for site specific permissions (maybe some PHP looking at the {site_name} variable and comparing it to the member group names). I’d just need to figure out the most logical place to store the allowed member groups for each website.
If anyone has a suggestion for this, I’m grateful to hear it. Otherwise, I can try a few things out in a sandbox environment and share the results on this thread.
Tim
Thanks for the replies. Setting access in the templates occurred to me as well, but it is an important goal for the websites to share common templates (the UI requirements for the websites dictate this). So, setting the member group access in a template shared among various websites with unique permissions doesn’t get me what I need. Tim
I actually think it would still work. In order to share templates across sites you’ll have to embed them. Permissions get set on the parent, which embeds the child template from another site.
OK, let me take a crack at that. Thanks!