website structure, best way for log in sys and subdomains use!

[spiritssight]

I was told this would be better in this forums then the coding one!

Hi,

I was wondering, I will have a number of features on the website, News, Products, Resources, Forums, Mail etc, they will also have there own subdomain name that will piont to the app as if they click the link that was on the webpage.
now when they click on the enter the subdomain like news.yoursite.com thats what will stay in the address bar of there browser.

Now on top of this all of these feature have features that if they create account will have access to, so I have ONE log in sysem.

How would you handle this?

Would you have directories with the main dir (www) and inside this have your apps dir?
dev/www main dir
dev/www/mail/ mail module
dev/www/news/ news module
dev/www/forums/ forums module
dev/www/user-sys/ used for all things to do with log in, account create, account activation
dev/www/lib/ used for common files for all module
dev/www/css/ used for fundation of appearice of site

Would you have the directories on the same level as the main directory?
dev/www/ main dir
dev/mail/ mail module
dev/news/ news module
dev/forums/ forums module
dev/user-sys/ used for all things to do with log in, account create, account activation
dev/lib/ used for common files for all module
dev/css/ used for fundation of appearice of site

After the above questions, would you have the subdomain show the directory or hide the directory?
meaning mail.yoursite.com would display that way, or could be displayed like mail.yoursite.com/mail/?

now when I am developing stuff its in dev which is for developing only, its not for the public how can I design the site so when I am moving it over to the public side, it will work and I would not have to edit the files?

So any how I am having this setup today to have the subdomain of admin, I want to use the same log in system as the main site as users have access level based on codes assigned to there user_id, so if a person logs in and they are logging through the main site login screen then they are show that, but if there use admin.yoursite.com and have access to admin functions then they see that screen if not they are told they don't have access rights
so back to my question; what is the best way to setup the structor for being able to use subdomain?

Thanks for your advice!

Sincerely,
Christopher

[sneakyimp]

You should probably read up on your web server's virtual domain handling docs. Apache is the one I always use and what happens is you type in a request for somesubdomain.mydomain.com and your computer goes out to the internet and find the appropriate DNS server. That DNS server can either give the same IP to all of your subdomains or it can match each subdomain to a different machine. Sounds like you have one machine hosting all of your subdomains.

In that case, it's up to your web server to direct an HTTP request for a subdomain to a particular location in your filesystem. At this point, there are two ways to go about this (in apache anyways...can't tell you how it works for IIS). You can either create a <virtualhost> directive that points a given subdomain to some folder OR you can use mod_rewrite to apply some pattern matching to the incoming domain so you can extract the subdomain part and send it as a parameter to some PHP file.

In other words, mod_rewrite can map a request for foobar.mydomain.com
onto mydomain.com/index.php?sub=foobar. Not only that, it can let the user still see foobar.subdomain.com in their browser window.

I don't have much expertise in this area so I can't really tell you how to go about it. You might want to consult your sysadmin.

[spiritssight]

Thanks for the post, but I have someone doing that stuff, I was just trying to figure out how to setup the dir for coding easer.

Sincerely,
Christopher

[sneakyimp]

You should talk to that someone then because his/her decisions will determine what the best approach will be. Personally, I think mail.mydomain.com/mail is not the best thing to have going on.

Try to get mod_rewrite working. That's my advice.

[spiritssight]

so do you think that:

mail.yoursite.com should show as mail.yoursite.com and thats it and put that app in its own dir not off of the main site dir?

would you do this with admin stuff?

Sincerely,
Christopher