Sharing content across sites - The Daily Drupal, 24 July 2009

In today's Daily Drupal, I'm presenting an issue we're facing: how to share content across our Drupal sites. We are migrating roughly 70 websites to Drupal in the manner described on this page.

Currently, like many websites, we use Dreamweaver to manage our flagship site with many SSIs (Server Side Includes) that are used for sharing bits of content on multiple pages on our site but also for sharing with our 70-odd affiliate sites. So, we're looking for a clean and elegant solution in Drupal for translating this relationship, the relationship between SSIs and their respective pages/sites.

We have considered solutions that involve:

• using RSS feed(s) in some creative way
• standard blocks shared between sites (how to do this?)

but are pretty sure neither are appropriate for this task. For instance, blocks, by default, appear on every page and that's not what we want. We want certain bits of content (currently stored in SSIs or .inc files) to be able to be placed within specific pages on multiple sites.

The Deploy Module looks promising but is still in development. Something like Crossite looks interesting but has no Drupal 6 version. And, finally, I turned up the SSI Module, also still in development, which looks appealing as well.

I'm sure we'll figure this out as I'd imagine many many folks are moving to CMSes like Drupal from a Dreamweaver, static .html, SSI world. And, my experience so far with Drupal is that it is very flexible and thus there are probably several ways to accomplish this.

Beginning next week, The Daily Drupal will become The Weekly Drupal (I was, perhaps, a bit too ambitious with the "daily" part). I will try to write a very thorough, weekly post about my experience working with Drupal. The RSS feed remains here and the tag has been updated to "Weekly Drupal."