integration of one isntance with multiple sites

[Keith Miller]

anyone know how to have 1 instance and multiple site and be able to search/index between them

[prb]

I'm also interested in this.  It seems the beginnings of a Plone product for this never made it into the build?
http://plone.org/products/plone-multisite
?

[Sergey V.]

Keith Miller wrote:

anyone know how to have 1 instance and multiple site and be able to search/index between them

I'm wondering if Plone is able to work with its portal_catalog deleted and acquiring it from its parent folder... you probably should test it if you're curious. That would be a simple solution

- Sites (Folder)
 -- portal_catalog
 -- plone_site_1
 -- plone_site_2
 -- ...

Otherwise you can write a script which performs separate searches for every Plone instance and then merges the results.

[Sergey V.]

prb wrote:

I'm also interested in this.  It seems the beginnings of a Plone product for this never made it into the build?
http://plone.org/products/plone-multisite
?

As I can see, the product aims to provide "copy document to a production server on publish" functionality, nothing to do with multiple sub-sites in one Zope (or even Plone) instance

[Sergey V.]

Sergey V. wrote:

...That would be a simple solution

- Sites (Folder)
 -- portal_catalog
 -- plone_site_1
 -- plone_site_2
 -- ...

Well, after some testing I can tell you that you can do it even simpler: create a Plone site and then create a few subsites inside. Then delete portal_catalog in each of the subsites.

Subsites appear to work properly without portal_catalog. I even installed different skins. The search, however, doesn't work across sites - I suppose Plone restricts search results to a specific path. BUT you can observe items being added to the 'global' catalog when you add documents to one of the subsites.

So I think it's a matter of modifying search logic to not restrict search results to a subsite (or somehow calling it in a context of the parent site... just a quick idea: if you acquire the search form from the parent site, it'll return all results.

Something like this:

- global (Plone Site)
 -- local_1 (Plone Site without portal_catalog)
 -- local_2 (Plone Site without portal_catalog)

Now if you go to http://www.local1.com/search you'll get results from local_1 only. But if you go to http://www.local1.com/global/search, you should get results from local_1 and local_2

Now I'm wondering what can be done to make /global/search use skin from one or another local site depending where it is called from... Have any ideas? I bet removing portal_skins, portal_css and portal_javascripts from global might do the trick :)))