Structuring site with multiple subsites

Question

I have to make a website that has a single craft installation and one database.

Now the site is for a company that owns several garages which should have their own subsite on a subdomain. It should all be multilingual and those subsite/subdomains would have single pages as well as channels for used cars or new cars.

Now what I'm wondering is how to set up those subsites. Their url structure should be like http://subsite.domain.com/{lang}/{single-page} or http://subsite.domain.com/{lang}/blog/{slug}

I was thinking maybe using a structure per subsite to keep all the content uncluttered in the dashboard and creating a channel for each subsite blog, used cars section and new cars section.

But I'm not really sure what the best way to set this up would be or even how to point the pages/channels to a subdomain.

Would I have to create new multi-environmont configs for each subsite or is there a way to do this automatically or maybe that's not even necessary?

Each subsite will also have users who can only edit that specific subsite. (Maybe something to keep in mind when structuring the site)

Here's a little diagram that might help show what I'm looking for:

Of course I'll be using craft pro for the languages and users.

Any help and tips would be much appreciated. (Feel free to ask for more information if necessary)

Thank you very much in advance

Answer 1

As of this comment, Craft 3 is still in beta but you may want to consider it as your challenge sounds like the new Sites functionality may be a good fit.

Sites, allow you to manage multiple websites and multiple languages in one Craft installation. You can find a longer discussion and some examples here: Managing Multiple Sites in Craft 3 – Sites and Localization

You could create a Site for each combo of Garage and Language that you need to manage. For example:

• Garage 1 - French
• Garage 1 - German
• Garage 2 - French
• Garage 2 - German

The blog and other sections for each of these sites could be managed under one channel. Admin users would be able to switch between each subsite just as they switch between locales when editing an entry. User Groups could be created for each subsite as well as the permissions in Craft 3 will allow you to restrict a users access to a specific subsite.

You can read more about how to configure each site in this Localization Guide in the Craft docs. You'll need to configure a couple of files for each site and make sure your DNS is pointing to the right place for each subdomain. But once you get those items setup, you should be able to use the same templates for all of the different sites and languages.