Synchronizing Multiple Content Management Systems Joomla Drupal

[ken]

I have a friend who has an organization with many Chapters around the U.S.

Each Chapter has some members, events, and articles that are unique, but all members are considered members, too of their State, Region, and National organization.

So, for example, National or regional may want to email all members under their “umbrella”.

The issue is that Joomla, Drupal, etc. are mostly written for a single organization. and major rewrites are required to allow “multi-tenancy”. In Software as a Service, the best solution seems to be a virtualization system where every instance runs separate and isolated. I am thinking that this is probably the best model for the Chapters, too, because the installation, maintenance, etc. are so well standardized by Fantastico, Installatron, etc.

From preliminary review of the White Paper and the recent thread about synchronizing multiple sources, it looks like it should be possible to use a “pseudo PK” consisting of the PK of one CMS instance and a field that contains the ChapterID. I guess that could be appended to each table in each DB with a script after the CMS is installed, and defaulted to the Chapter ID?

Then, for example, lets look at mailing lists. National, Regional, and the Chapter might decide that there are 3 Mailing Lists that each member can subscribe to: Events, Activism, and General. I am thinking that the lists table could be pushed “down” the hierarchy, which is a tiny one-way table sync to every chapter, right? That way, if a list like Miscellaneous gets added, the user will have the opportunity to subscribe to Miscellaneous in his Profile in the CMS. Those subscriptions could be rolled “up” the organization via one way data synchs from the Chapter to the Regional or National, with the pseudo PK method, and National would have a record of everyone who was interested in Miscellaneous, or Activism, or Whatever, and their subscription status.

Content could be pushed, lets just assume “down” the organization, but it would probably be best to leave the Published and Frontpage flags unset, so that the Chapter can decide whether the story is relevant to their readership. Perhaps a flag could be added to the National or top level content table like “baseline”, which means that new chapters that come online automatically get the baseline articles, About Us, History, etc., as a baseline for their site.

Any thoughts on this proposed architecture? Is this appropriate for SJA or better for MySQL Replication?

I am specifically thinking of Joomla, because it is the CMS I know best, but the org in question uses Drupal and CiviCRM.

Thanks,

Ken

[peterlaursen]

It is very hard to tell a definite answer!

But if you are not in control of server configuration (shared server), then replication is out of question!

Basically we provide a TRIAL so that you can test with your own data, connections etc.

The standard TRIAL only allows for syncing two tables per job. We can make special arrangement, however. Please create a support ticket then.

[ken]

Thanks, Peter, for your consideration…

I own the Enterprise version, so it is only a matter of having the time to do the testing…

Best,

Ken

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