Multiple profiles on one server?

eschroeder

Yesterday I installed a copy of CA, what a great project!

In our institution we have several sections with autonomous collections:fine art, decorative art, ethnography, archaeology, plus the various branches of natural history. I think that the natural history sections would be happier with Specify, but I like the idea of developing in CA for the cultural sections.

Although I realize that we could do a somewhat generic CA profile and shoe-horn in each of the collections, I think the institution would be happier with separate, more focused CA installations, and using something like apache solr to handle institution-wide collection searches.

So, my question is: Is there an option to run multiple profiles from one code base, like the drupal multi-site capabilities? I know that I could have multiple virtual hosts in apache, each with a separate profile, database, and code base, but it would make maintenance easier to have a shared code base.

David

eschroeder Hello, good afternoon. I wanted to know if you were able to solve it and how you implemented it. We are on a different version of Providence (2.0.9), but your experience could still be useful to me.

seth

Hi,

It is possible to run multiple profiles from one code base, each in its own database. It would require a bit of configuration sleight-of-hand however. The standard configuration for the old 0.5x version of CollectiveAccess included support for this - we thought it was going to be very popular. Instead it just confused most users and caused lots of support headaches. So for 0.6/1.0 we decided to go with a somewhat simplified standard configuration that assumes a single installation per code-base.

If you want to host multiple profiles/databases in a single code-base you'd need to setup multiple configuration directories. Eg. you'd need multiple app/conf directories, and you'd need to point to them in your setup.php file by associating a hostname (or hostnames) with each config directory. You'd do this by setting each hostname in the $_CA_INSTANCE_CONFIG_FILES (line 110 in setup.php-dist) to a path to an app.conf file. Each configuration would need to point to its own database and use a unique app_name directive (normally this is set in CA_APP_NAME in the setup.php file, but you'd have to set it directly in app.conf or global.conf for multiple configs).

As you probably gather from all of this, it's a little bit involved to set up, but it can be done. If you really want to do this we can help you.

As for natural history, we're working on a couple of projects with CA related to paleontology and so far so good. But I think I would agree with you that your users working with "straight" natural history data (eg. specimen collections) would be better served with Specify. We are not trying to reinvent the wheel with CA, and Specify is already well suited to dealing with natural history-specific structures such as stratigraphy and taxonomy.

seth

eschroeder

Thank you for your helpful response. I think I understand the methods, and I'll do some experiments.