Question

I need to run 2 sites, One for high end customers and one for low end customers.

They both pretty much do the same thing but look different. For example they both might have product A, but the price and description (no duplicate content) will be different.

However, for the most part, they will have different products, high end products for the high end site and low end products for the low end site.

It is easier if both sites use the same underlying structure, so the many overlapping parts won’t have to be duplicated. Especially during changes. But it needs to allow for different logic per site when necessary.

So if I point 2 different domains (lets call them highend.com and lowend.com) to the same server. What is the best way to handle this?

Should/Can I determine what domain is being used in the app_controller and specify which layout to use or set a variable to be used by the child controllers? How?

Is there a way I can prefix some fields in the database. For example, if there is a products table and a products.highend_name and a products.lowend_name fields. Then in the code just refer to Product.name but depending on which domain is used, use the correct one. But for overlaping feilds like style_number there is no prefix just products.style_number since its the same either way. Is there a way to set something like this up? How?

Whats the best way to go about doing something like this? Is there a different framework that could handle this better?

Answer 1

In the controller:

$host = $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'];
if($host=='www.posh.com')
{
    $this->layout = 'posh';
}
elseif($host=='www.cheap.com')
{
    $this->layout = 'cheap';
}
else
{
    $this->layout = 'default';
}