Umbraco multi-site: traffic is redirected to top-most content site

Question

I've installed Umbraco v6.1.6 locally and finished developing multiple-skinned site. Each skin has its own IIS site and application pool and use the same umbraco instance. Everything is working as expected in this local setup.

But when I tried going live it didn't go smoothly as expected. :/

The structure is somewhat like so:

Site-A
    EN
      Home
    ES
      Home

Site-B
    EN
      Home
    ES
      Home

I've configured Site-B with IIS to use my owned domain and the EN, ES languages to use the domain/EN, domain/ES respectively. The skin and language nodes have a macro that reads a picked content to navigate to, and I've configued each one to navigate to the Home page.

The macro fails because Umbraco sets Model object to be Site-A's, even though I'm seeing the Site-B's address in the browser's address bar.

Why Umbraco ignores my hostname settings and sets a different node from a non-hostnamed site as my Model object ? How can I fix this issue ?

Thanks for the helpers and readers (!)

I'm curious about two things. Firstly I will just need to double check that it is actually the production hostnames that you have set on the skin node (Site-A and Site-B nodes). Secondly, why do you have multiple IIS websites pointing at the same Umbraco physical path? — Emil Rasmussen
I was actually during the process of setting the actual hostname for Site-B and when I checked it I saw Site-A. And to your second question, I want my different sites to be managed with the same Umbraco instance. It's quite common as I understand it (for code, templates, content types reuse) — Dror Weiss
But why not just use the same IIS website for all sites? That would be easier to setup and maintain. It should also keep you out of trouble with regard to writing to the same files. — Emil Rasmussen

dampee dampee · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-24T13:29:17

If I understand your setup well, you created different sites pointing to the same folder on your disk.

If so, stop doing so. Create just one "iis site", and add the different bindings (domain names) to the single site.

Then right click on your root nodes (SITE-A) and add the hostname. Click on the Language node (EN) and only add a culture (no domain name). Repeat this for other sites and language nodes.

Your site will now automatically pop up when the hostname matches.

Umbraco multi-site: traffic is redirected to top-most content site

1 Answers