Semi-Mirror sites

[rogerd]

A potential client just hit me up with an interesting issue, and I'm not sure what the most technically elegant and/or quickest approach would be. They have several locations, say, Chicago, LA, and Dallas. Each of these currently has its own domain, e.g., acmedallas.com, acmechicago.com, etc.

They have redesigned the "chicago" site, and now want the other sites to display that content dynamically, i.e., when the chicago home page is edited, the others will reflect that change. They want visitors to still think they are on the acmedallas site, though.

I haven't set up mirrored domains before (usually I recommend against mirroring), but SEO isn't a major concern with this client. I assume that one replaces all absolute internal URLs with relative references to avoid switching domains unexpectedly.

One clinker is that they would like to have some unique content, like a guestbook, for each location. Thus, if you are on the acmedallas site, if you click on most links, you get the mirrored content, but if you click on "Guestbook" you get the acmedallas guestbook.

Any thoughts or suggestions? I've got a few rattling around, but they seem a bit of a kluge.

[WebGuerrilla]

I don't know exactly who the sites are set up, but if it is a dynamic site that uses a template system, you can set the server up to load specifc template based on the the specific domain name.

All the content is in one database. If someone visits the site using a domain nme for Los Angeles, the content is loaded into the LA template, which can have additional navigation.

If the sites are actually separate, you could simply use an html fetcher type script (similar to how news feed scripts work) to load the content from the master site.

[Brett_Tabke]

You could put all the local stuff in one directory and then just mirror the rest of the site with mirror software. Keep them all the same - even the mirror the local directories. Then setup one directory called "redirect".

/chicago
/dallas
/redirect

The redirect would be local and would redirect via meta refresh to the correct local directory (/dallas for /dallas, ect). That way you only have one directory accross the entire network that is different. Your links for guestbooks would go to /redirect/guestbook and it would redirect to the /dallas/guestbook directory.

[rogerd]

Thanks, Brett. Sounds like a good approach. Any suggestions for preferred mirror software? I tried some Google searches, but didn't come up with much... hotscripts et al are next.