Multiple sites on Umbraco - sharing content

Question

I have an Umbraco database/back-end that has two sites configured on it (SiteA and SiteB for this purpose)

I wish to create a third site/repository that I can keep nodes common to both sites in and have the two sites reference

I have set up a third site with some nodes/document types in but when I try to add them as targets to the SiteA and SiteB pages, I get an error saying "The site cannot be reached" in the browser

The new site does have a hostname set in Umbraco - does this need to be a site that is available within IIS? Why can Umbraco not just serve up content within the context of SiteA or SiteB?

Answer 1

What version of Umbraco are you using? On very old version of Umbraco, what you are trying to do is possible, but in newer builds, if Site A and Site B have host names set, you won't be able to access the content from the other site using out of the box functionality.

Probably the easiest way to do what you want would be to build a custom URL Provider and Content finder. The custom URL provider can be used to check which domain the site is on (from A and B) and if the node the URL is being generated for is on A or B, include the correct domain in the returned URL. The custom content finder would then look for the content in site C if it's not found in site A or B.

Just be aware that you may have to be careful calling for things like parents etc, as technically content on site C does not sit in the tree for A or B, so calling the parent on the Node from C will pull in its parent from C, and not content from site A or B.

One other consideration, if the content is nodes with content in, Google penalises sites for duplicate content. So if you have identical content on site A and site B, there is a chance that your SEO rankings may be adversely effected.