A site within a site

[djb]

Hi Folks

Got a quick question which could save me mucking around for hours with various CMS.

I have a client who runs conferences, his website has the usual stuff, about us, contact and so on but also has links for each conference. When you click on this link each individual conference is essentially a new website apart from a return to home button which takes you back to the parent website.

Now I want to redo his main website using Drupal/Wordpress - ideally Wordpress as I feel its simpler. What I would like to do is have this site within a site system still though. I know Wordpress allows you to change the header banners for different categorys/sections (can’t remember the terms they use) but is that all it can do? Can you change the whole colour scheme of a section? Make all the generic links (about us etc.) disappear?

It’s been a long time since I touched Drupal but I suspect it can do this - not sure though.

The client wants me to create a new website for a large, upcoming conference, but I want to redo his main site as it’s looking a bit ropey, I thought I would try and combine the two and save myself a job.

Does this even make sense

Thanks

David

[sthomas]

Hi David,

From what I can gather from your post, I'm pretty sure you could easily achieve this 'site within a site' system using WordPress.

All of the smaller conference sites would be based on the same template but you could easily redo the header banner and modify the CSS so that the colour schemes change.

One thing you'd have to be aware of is how many MySQL databases your hosting package would allow you to have (you'd need 1 MySQL database for the main site and 1 for every conference site you intend to create).

Hope that doesn't confuse things.

Cheers

Scott

[chris_17]

Could you not just create a different page? i.e. copying the php file and using the

<?php /* Template Name: New Template Name */ ?>

so you can then assign that file to the page you've created.

Also there are a few plugins you can use to use different stylesheets for different page like what Jason Santa Maria does on his site, there a tutorial on CSS Tricks I believe as well.

Saves having to mess around with backend stuff.

Hope this helps

Chris

EDIT: Providing it's Wordpress obviously.

[djb]

Hi Chaps

Thanks for the answers, I think changing the CSS file would do it, as any user interaction (ie registering for the conferences) could all be done hopefully through the main site and database. The idea of multiple databases scares me!

What I’m particularly interested in is the navigation and hiding/showing particular pages/categories (sorry, can’t remember the exact terms - taxonomy springs to mind) depending on where you are in the site. For example:

Arriving at the main site (www.main.com) you get:

About | Conference 1 | Contact Us
All displayed in a lovely shade of blue or something

Then you click on Conference 1 (or go to www.conference1.com) at which point the navigation changes to:

Back to Main.com | Conference 1 Stuff A | Conference 1 Stuff B
Same layout (everything in the same place), just a nice shade of pink with this different navigation and a different header graphic.

I apologise if it seems lazy posting this, but I don’t wan’t to go off half-cocked and get myself in a mess if someone else can say "you just need to do this!". This is what I generally do :)

[chris_17]

Hi Chaps

Thanks for the answers, I think changing the CSS file would do it, as any user interaction (ie registering for the conferences) could all be done hopefully through the main site and database. The idea of multiple databases scares me!

What I’m particularly interested in is the navigation and hiding/showing particular pages/categories (sorry, can’t remember the exact terms - taxonomy springs to mind) depending on where you are in the site. For example:

Arriving at the main site (www.main.com) you get:

About | Conference 1 | Contact Us
All displayed in a lovely shade of blue or something

Then you click on Conference 1 (or go to www.conference1.com) at which point the navigation changes to:

Back to Main.com | Conference 1 Stuff A | Conference 1 Stuff B
Same layout (everything in the same place), just a nice shade of pink with this different navigation and a different header graphic.

I apologise if it seems lazy posting this, but I don’t wan’t to go off half-cocked and get myself in a mess if someone else can say "you just need to do this!". This is what I generally do :)

Firstly a disclaimer it's very late, I'm tired and just finished off a bitch of a Uni assignment, so this may not work or make any sense at all

However you could do some weird stuff with conditionals, and echo the links, I'm not sure if there is a parameter in the wordpress navigation/show links function that allows you to sort by body class/id

What I mean is say you have a

<body id="conference-one"> 

In a perfect world it would be this:
PHP:

<?php

if ($bodyID=='conference-one')
{
echo 'Back to main menu';
...
}
?>

There may be some stuff you can do with filters in Wordpress but I'm not entirely sure, alternatively a quick and dirty way would be to add all of the links to begin with, use the body class or id and based on whatever the body class is, hide the css elements.

.conference-one #home-nav{display:hidden;} 

Hope that makes some sense!

[djb]

That makes perfect sense! Thanks!