Krafting Synergy

After going through lot of custom funtions for generating ordinal number in PHP, I was finally able to find the best way (so far) for doing it.

$num = 32;
$temp_num = ($num>31)?($num%31)+1:$num;
print $num.date('S', mktime(0,0,0,$temp_num,0,0));

Necessity for using mod function at second line is because date function only considers valid number range from 1 to 31 for day parameter and using mod function this way keeps it in this range and does the trick. You will need to pass the number that you want to show as ordinal as 4th parameter to mktime function.

Hope this saves time.

This post is in continuation to Multisite Installation In Drupal 6.

In the previous post mentioned above, we were using separate databases for each site within the same drupal core. There will be requirements where you will be required to have a single database to be shared among multiple drupal site installs. One important requirement being sharing of user access. It will be quite possible that multiple sites setup on same drupal core will want to share the user base. Also, it will be important that user login sessions be shared among those multiple sub sites. Under these circumstances, you will be required to have a single database with some of the tables (if not all) to be shared among the sub sites.

Below are the steps to do that assuming you have one sub site configured like http://example.com/subsite1/ using database ‘example_db’, and you create another sub site like http://example.com/subsite2/ to use same database. Just before running install.php for subsite2 make below mentioned changes to /subsite2/settings.php file by setting $db_prefix as an array like below

# /subsite2/settings.php
$db_url = 'mysql://user:pwd@localhost/example_db';

$db_prefix = array(
     'default'   => 'subsite2_',
     'users'     => '',
     'sessions'  => '',
     'authmap'   => '',
);
# By setting $db_prefix array like above, we are prefixing every other table with 'subsite2' except for 'users', 'sessions' and 'authmap' tables thereby marking them as shared.

The other way of doing the same thing will be to specify non shared tables like

# /subsite2/settings.php
$db_url = 'mysql://user:pwd@localhost/example_db';

$db_prefix = array(
     'default'   => '',
     'users'     => 'subsite2_',
     'sessions'  => 'subsite2_',
     'authmap'   => 'subsite2_',
);
# By setting $db_prefix array like above, we are sharing every table between 'subsite1' and 'subsite2' except for 'users', 'sessions' and 'authmap' tables.

Now, you should be ready to run install on subsite2.

Nutshell: The only important point for using a single database between multiple drupal sites with some or none shared tables is the ability to specify shared/non shared tables which is as simple as specifying list of tables within $db_prefix as key/value pairs.

Note: if you want to have single database to be used between multiple drupal sites with no tables shared, just specify table prefix as

$db_prefix = 'subsite2_';

Assuming you have basic drupal 6 installation already working on a LAMP server. Below are the steps to setup multiple sites to work on same drupal core like site1.com, site2.com etc.

Create site databases

Start by creating databases for each site like site1, site2 etc thereby setting specific credentials to each database created.

Setup drupal site configuration directories

Copy and paste /sites/default directory and rename the copied directories to /sites/site1.com, /sites/site2.com directories. The only important file from the /sites/default directory being settings.php, you can skip all the other files/directories while copying /sites/default directory. Although, later on you might need to create several different directories within each site directory like files, modules, themes etc contents of whom will be specific to that site. Edit settings.php file of each site and set database details specific to each site.

Create virtual hosts for each site under Apache2

Steps for creating virtual hosts under debian/ubuntu based systems. Open terminal use below commands

$ cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
$ sudo gedit site1.com
Put below contents within this file
<VirtualHost 127.0.1.5:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
ServerName site1.com

DocumentRoot /home/umar/Work/htdocs/drupal6
<Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
</Directory>
<Directory /home/umar/Work/htdocs/drupal6>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    allow from all
</Directory>
 </VirtualHost>

$ sudo a2ensite site1.com

Repeat the above steps for all sites with unique local IP’s for each site. When done with creation of all files reload apache

$ /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Now edit the /etc/hosts file to include mapping of these new sites like $ sudo gedit /etc/hosts With contents like 127.0.0.1 localhost 127.0.1.5 site1.com 127.0.1.6 site2.com

Thats all there is to it, now go to url like http://site1.com/install.php of each site and follow normal drupal installation procedure.

I will soon be posting article showing usage of single DB between multiple drupal sites configuration.

Cheers