Need "replicating website" ideas

marms

I am trying to figure out how to do a replicating website application in such a way that many domains are pointed to one IP where the application is located, yet the PHP script would track which site it is and serve up their "skins" and content from their settings in a database. I have the application programming part down and have done site replication before, but I had to do the URL part like this:

http://www.mainsitedomain.com/ReplicatedSiteName/

I had a customer 404 error set up in which it would look for "ReplicatedSiteName" in a table and when it found it would redirect them to the application with session vars of their site id set. The problem with that is it is obvious to any visitors that it "is" a replicated web site due to the URL having www.mainsitedomain.com in it all the time. I need a way for the site to be referred to as http://www.ReplicatedSiteName.com the whole time yet it is hitting the same application located at the IP of the domain “mainsitedomain.com” and PHP is able to track which replicating website is which. Also, "frame forwarding" is out of the question due to the search engine handicapping this would produce for each site.

The direction I started going with this was to have PHP check the CGI var "SERVER_NAME" on every page hit and it would pull check for "ReplicatedSiteName.com" in a table and serve up their content. The problem is I started testing this variable on a site that has 1 main domain "ThisSite.org" and 2 other domain "parked" there also "ThisSite.com, ThisSite.net." When I tested what the CGI var returned by going to the site from the .com and .net domains the "SERVER_NAME" always came back as "ThisSite.org" regardless.

I have seen other site offer this type of service and they "seem" to be doing it similar to how I am describing, unless they are making a "copy" of their replicating software and database every time and dropping it into another virtural directory (which would also be out of the question for me.)

I am mainly a coder and know little about server administration subjects. Could someone give me any ideas how to "pull off" this effect in this or some other way?

Thanks.

flatpooks

wouldnt it be $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] u should be looking at?

marms

I just tested your suggestion. But sadly, $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] only returned the filename. For example the URL is "http://www.domain.com/myfile.php" and the variable only returned "/myfile.php"

Thanks for your response.

Any other ideas?

flatpooks

ok then i guess what i would do is set up all the domains to point to their own folders on the server and put a single php script in each domain folder that just set a bunch of session vars and redirected to the common site code

seems foolproof even tho it is a slightly basic approach

marms

When this redirect from these many directories occur back to the main directory I would suspect that the URL would have to change from http://www.TheirUniqueDomain.com/ to http://www.MyApplicationDomain.com with the session variables set. This is the main issue I am trying to avoid. I am needed the URL always to remain http://www.TheirUniqueDomain.com to keep it from looking like a replicating website to their visitors and for the search engines to be able to index pages with their domain in it and not mine.

I have seen a guy this kind of replication in CFML, but not sure how he is doing it on the back end.

The following URL's are replicated sites from the same application:
http://www.southbayvcf.com
http://www.pointblankonline.org

And they are done by this guy:
http://cf.jittle.com -- who has a site replicating site demo on his site called "JChurch" along with the site administrator.

The trick is that this guy in these examples is able to do everything I am after such maining unique website URL's as you click around the site yet it "seems" as if we are hitting the same exact application (wthout using frames.) I can't see this guy making a copy of the same application code in each directory for these replicating sites. That would be a pain if you had to make any upgrades to the replicating website application.

Shrike

I would guess there is a simple wrapper which sits on each domain and gets the actual code from one place. Not sure though - I'm not up on what Coldfusion can do.

That's probably what I would do in PHP, in fact it sort-of represents how class inheritance works 🙂

marms

Thanks for your reply Shrike.

I don't know how to do a "simple wrapper" on each domain and how that would work or how it would get the code from "one place." I know little about server administration. Could you refer me to documentation on these subjects?

Thanks

flatpooks

thats kinda what i was getting at by using the domains as 'wrappers' but like shrike i dont really know how the details would work unless u have some kind of 'stub' file in each domain that processes all page requests for a particular domain and calls into a common pool of scripts

marms

OK, I am cool with creating a "stub" file for each domain. Now the question I have now is how do I "call into a common pool of scripts." I have one of these dedicated servers with an "Ensim" control panel. Now if I use it create another "site" and point one of the domains to it how do I call php scripts from somewhere else on the same server yet under another IP address?

flatpooks

well u have a directory outside of any domain that holds all the scripts used by all the domains ... this outside folder is recommended for most sensitive scripts on regular servers anyways ... i think u configure ur htaccess file to set that up

(im not an admin expert - sorry :/ )

Moonglobe

instead of server_name, try http_host. it's the Host: header the browser sent, which would be the name of the site.

hth
moon

marms

Thanks so much Moonglobe!

That totally worked. I tested it and it returned the "alias" domain as seen in the URL rather than the "registered" domain.

Moonglobe

when looking for stuff like this, it always helps to do a print_r($_SERVER) 🙂