[KW802]

Originally Posted by BirdOPrey5

3 Reasons
1) Lets say you have an established forum with a bunch of members and you want to start a new forum wouldn't it be nice to tell everyone they can visit and are already registered members?

2) Say you have related forums, say a music forum, one for 80's music and another for 90's music- you can now give each a separate identity but share users and some forums between both sites.

3) From an admin standpoint it's only 1 install to maintain and backup to cover all your sites.

In my case I was really after #3 on your list, of reducing the number of 'small' sites I had when instead I could upgrade them all at one shot by using a shared back-end but with the plus side of sharing some things between them, like v3 Arcade.

Example: CinVin & Lower Pottsgrove

(Forget the content of the sites since I really am using them at this point for testing more than anything. ) They look like two totally independent sites (including the vBa CMPS "Home" page thanks to some other code I am working on) but clicking on the Arcade link in the navbar on both sites shows the same games, same top scorers, etcetera. There are still some little things to be done, but for the most part as long as users are aware that the sites are shared, then it looks like it will work fine for what I had in mind.

The kicker is that if you want to merge existing sites together then you have to really consider the fact that all of your URLs for the merged-in site will be lost. Not a problem for small sites or new sites but is not something I will consider (for example, I won't be merging Cool Sci-Fi into CinVin because of the URL issue). The other item to consider is sitemaps... currently there is no support for having the vB Sitemap be generated with the correct domains for the add-on sites.

In short, for me, new sites going forward will be virtual sites off of the main CinVin database but I won't be merging any of my other existing sites into it.