Hi,
Just wanted to have a feel around with other people who have implemented more than one site on a single matrix installation.
Basically we are looking to have our Intranet and Website on the same system so that we can have some content that is common to both and some that is common to one or the other. The common content is not fixed (ie we don't know the extent of the shared content and we would like to be able to change it at any stage). As far as I am aware, none of the content is highly classified or anything like that so there is no problem holding it on the same system.
I was wondering, has anyone out there implemented such a system before and how did they handle such things as the security to block external access the the system (apart from using permissions) and were there any specific problems or difficulties that you would like to share regarding your implementation that you think could be useful.
We are also consulting with Squiz regarding this but I thought it would be useful to talk to other users too to gather as much information as possible while we make our decisions.
Thanks guys.
These days I very rarely see a Matrix system with just one site in it. Its usually about five or six minimum!
Security is obviously one of the aspects you need to consider carefully, to ensure that if people do share content between your Intranet and Internet sites that content is not inadvertantly made public. This is as much a policy/procedural component as it is a technical one. You'd need to ensure strong permissions on particularly sensitive content, perhaps even going so far as to Deny public read to sections of your Intranet.
From a performance point of view, the size of the system has to be weighed against the usage patterns. You could have a tiny system that under-performs because of overwhelming utilisation. Though, there are some processes that obviously get longer as the site gets bigger (things like rollback). This is why things like using the Matrix cache with an external caching engine are recommending.
We have around 30 sites at last count - then again, we're somewhat extreme ;)
They all seem to be functioning well, although if you are hosting huge amounts of content you may run into other issues as Avi mentioned.
One tip to note is that if you are linking from one URL to another, you may need to use an absolute URL. We've found that Matrix likes to pick the 'nearest' asset when choosing the right design to apply, and on occasion when linking across sites, linking to a Matrix asset ID will apply the wrong design.
[quote]One tip to note is that if you are linking from one URL to another, you may need to use an absolute URL. We’ve found that Matrix likes to pick the ‘nearest’ asset when choosing the right design to apply, and on occasion when linking across sites, linking to a Matrix asset ID will apply the wrong design.
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You should be using internal links for this – if the target site is on a completely different URL from the target asset, Matrix will select the shortest URL for that asset to print. Is this not an appropriate solution?
[quote]You should be using internal links for this – if the target site is on a completely different URL from the target asset, Matrix will select the shortest URL for that asset to print. Is this not an appropriate solution?
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This may since have been fixed, but at the time of setting up some of our sites (under 3.6, we’re now using 3.10) we would find that linking from page A on site A to page B on site B would occasionally give page B with site A’s design. The problem got worse with larger sites. What we’d expect is for the pages to be displayed with the appropriate design as applied to the page on the Settings tab, but this is not always the case. It would often happen when linking from deep in a large site to another site hosted on our machine - the shortest URL situation might well be the cause of this, but the design applied would be incorrect.
[quote]we would find that linking from page A on site A to page B on site B would occasionally give page B with site A’s design.
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This should never happen, ever. Page B should only ever be displayed with the design applied to Page B, as visible on its Settings screen. I would urge you to retest this in your current version so that we can determine if the problem still exists and if so, how to fix it.