JMS Multisites extend joomla with Multi Sites and user sharing. This allows multiple domain names or sites to have their own joomla configuration file using the same joomla installation. Possibility to share the users, and extensions like VirtueMart, Community Builder, JomSocial, ...
With this new feature you can share the joomla files and folders to create totally independent web sites.
This simply the maintenance of Joomla as you have only one instance to update for all the websites.
With JMS you can create website based on website template to create new slave site.
A "maintenance" functionality is also provided to help supervising the extension installed in each website with their datamodel and help you fix the potential datamodel errors.
As each website has its own joomla configuration.
You can decide to use:
- One database for all the websites. In this case, you must specify different database table prefix for each websites.
- Two databases (One master database and One slave database). This architecture is advised when you want to install JMS on an existing website and you are limited in the number of databases you can create (or disk space).
- As many databases than there are websites. This is the most flexible architecture where each websites works with its own database. This is generally the architecture adopted by joomla when you create multiple websites.
The content of each website is totally independent. This means that the content (articles, news, forum, users, ...) are NOT shared.
The setup of each configuration site consists in using the standard joomla installation mechanism.
In the administration of a 'Slave' site, you can re-install/uninstall extension previously installed on the 'Master' site.
The 'Master' site is the one where you have installed the Joomla MultiSite component and where you manage the 'Slave' sites.
Additional controls are performed during the installation/uninstallation of an extension in a 'slave' site.
Before executing the standard joomla installation, it is verified that the extension you request to install has exactly the same name and same version number to avoid inconsistency between all sites.
This additional control is performed to ensure that you will overwrite the current installation with identical files that you originally installed.
On 'slave' site, uninstalling an extension consists in a joomla standard cleanup of the database. The files present on disk for this extension is not deleted to avoid disturb the other sites.
You can also replicate a website into the same database or in different DB to avoid re-installing the extension in each slave site.
On Unix platform, it is also possible to deploy a slave site into a specific folder.
You can also share user and share the content of a limited number of extensions.