You can also use a single web project to have multiple websites. You can group all of the assets related to a website into a folder in a web project. Hence, a web project could have many such folders and each one could be interpreted and managed as a website.
This approach is better when compared to having a separate web project for each website if you have the following requirements:
- All of the content in these websites have similar workflow approval processes
- The content is managed by the same set of people
- All of the websites have a similar look and feel
- The deployment (going live) to the product server or servers for all of these websites happens at the same time
Basically, this is good for small to medium websites where majority of the content is static.
One scenario could be deploying all of the folders to a specific target server. On that target server you could use web server proxy to have a specific URL pointing to a specific folder, as shown in the following diagram:
Another scenario could be deploying selected folders to a specific live server as shown in the following diagram. This can be done by using the Source Path and Excludes fields of deployment, while configuring the FSR on a stage server. Refer to Chapter 7, Content Delivery and Deployment for more details on deployment:
Another way of creating multiple websites within a web project is to use multiple webapp folders.
The webapp folder is the web application folder used in application servers such as Tomcat or JBoss. A web application exists as a structured hierarchy of directories. The root of this hierarchy serves as a root for serving files that are part of this context. For example, for a web application located at site2 in a web server, the index.html file located at the base of the web application hierarchy can be served to satisfy a request to http://some_url/site2/index.html.
In Alfresco WCM, each web project has only one web application (webapp) folder and it is named as ROOT. To create another webapp folder for a specific web project, navigate to the Actions drop-down menu and click on Create Webapp Folder:
You can also change the default web application. Click on Edit Web Project Settings from the Actions drop-down menu and change the setting in the Default Webapp field as shown in the following screenshot:
