Question

I am building a portal which will have different cities content..

When someone comes to the website i want them to choose the city and then proceed

to

http://city1.site.com

or

http://city2.site.com

can this be done using a single database and installation of cakephp ?

Answer 1

Yes it’s possible.

Basically in your DNS you have to allow *.site.com to be hosted on a single machine.
This way, no matter what subdomain you type the machine will be the same.

an example dns record:

*   A   10.0.0.1

Then in the virtual host declaration you have to put

<VirtualHost *>
        DocumentRoot /var/www/path_to_site
        ServerName site.com
        ServerAlias www.site.com *.site.com
</VirtualHost>

this way no matter what you type i.e. something.site.com or city.site.com will be redirected to a single app.

Then you have just to parse the host from the php (preferably in AppController) and to transform the subdomain to filter.

It’s a little bit abstract, but that’s how I would do it.

Edit (response to the comment):
It’s a matter of how it is build the system. Basically if yo have:

cite1.site.com

in your AppController you can have something like:

class AppController extends Controller {
  function beforeFilter(){
     $host = explode('.', $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"]);
     $subdomain = $host[0];
     Configure::write('city', $subdomain);
     $this->City->getId($subdomain); //function in City model fetching City ID by city name
     ...
  }
}

So basically, after this it depends what is your application architecture and how you deal with this city.