Concepts¶

The terms every other page uses.

flowchart TB
  item(["Page: Opening hours"])
  item == canonical ==> acme["Main site: Acme<br/>acme.example.com"]
  item -. also shown on .-> globex["Main site: Globex<br/>globex.example.com"]
  acme --> jobs["Sub-site: Acme Jobs<br/>acme.example.com/jobs"]

Hub¶

The hub is the installation's own hostname. It belongs to no site. Platform administrators create and run all sites there, and editors can work on the content of their sites there.

Site¶

A site answers on a hostname, like acme.example.com, and has its own content, settings, languages, menus and people. A site can be disabled: it keeps everything, but its hostname stops serving it to visitors.

A main site has its own hostname. A sub-site lives under a main site's hostname at a path prefix, like acme.example.com/jobs, and needs no DNS entry of its own.

Site type¶

Every site is built from a site type. The type decides:

which settings its sites offer, and their defaults;
which kinds of content can belong to its sites, and to how many sites at once;
which roles can be granted on its sites.

Site types ship as configuration, from development to production. Sites themselves are content: they are created and changed on each environment in the admin UI.

Settings¶

A site's settings are grouped in sections, like site information, appearance, languages or the sitemap. A value comes from the most specific layer that sets one:

a value in settings.php on the server;
a value for the current environment, like staging or production;
a value for the current language;
the site's own value;
the default of the site type;
the default the module ships.

A sub-site can inherit: a setting it leaves empty takes the value of its main site.

Content on sites¶

Content belongs to one or more sites. Exactly one of them is the content's canonical site: its URL lives there, and the canonical site's people edit it. The other sites show the same content.

On a site's hostname, content of other sites answers "not found". Users are content too: they belong to the sites they work on.

With Content overrides, a site that shows content it does not own can change it for itself: its own title, text or layout. Visitors of that site see the site's version; every other site keeps the canonical one.

People¶

A role granted on the platform applies on every site. A per-site role applies on one site only, on top of the platform roles. Platform administrators can hand a site to a site manager, who then adds members to that site and grants them its roles, without any power over other sites.