Managing multiple sites through a single repository

[benembery]

Hi I've had request from my client to duplicate their website. They are looking to differentiate their two distinct brands.

From a technology perspective I'm fine with making the website multi-tenant and serving both sites from the same repository. Although I would appreciate any feedback you might have, as to why this might be a terrible idea . I've added some more background below that I think might provide some context.

The sites are going to have identical content models, equally the integrations that we have will remain identical and feed into the same systems in the background. However the content will be tailored to each audience. They want the slices to remain the same to keep the "feel" the same across the brand sites.

The most obvious gotcha I can think of is UIDs. The sites would not be able that use the same UID twice. For example and /about-us would be limited to a single brands site. My solution to this would be to prefix the brand to the UID. The website would then request a the content for a url like /about-us as brand-id-about-us. This is seemless to the user, but puts the onus on the content creator to ensure UIDs are correct.

I was considering adding brands as a content relationship along with tags in the writing room to make filtering easier.

I'd love to hear thoughts of anyone who's had to deal with similar problems.

[Pau]

Hey Ben, thanks for reaching out!

From my perspective, it is better to have two separate repositories for each site. But it depends on your needs.

On the one hand, if you have two repositories, as you have already mentioned, UIDs do not conflict and the content is independent, you do not have to worry about finding a way to classify documents with tags or categories, which makes the task of navigating and editing documents faster. And if there comes a time when some Custom type or Slice has to be modified, you don’t need to worry about having to update the code for the second project.

On the other hand, having a single repo would be an easy solution if you know that the structure of both sites has little chance of changing. Again, it all depends on how you plan your second project.

In case you want to have a second repository, this can be done manually, by migrating the Custom types to a new repository using the JSON editor, and adding the content from scratch. Or using the Environments feature, a paid option that lets you create clones of your repositories.