Multiple Site Manager Homepages and Fields

Question

Apologies if this is a simple question :/

I'm using Multiple Site Manager for the first time and although I get it in principle i'm struggling to understand how to setup homepages. Here's what I have got so far and then what i'm trying to do...

Done 1. Created multiple sites in CP (done) 2. Created templates/siteHandle directories (done) 3. Pointed webserver (done) 4. Confirmed correct index.twig is loaded on correct url (done)

I have then created a 'Single' section called 'Homepage' and checked both available sites to recognise this as the 'homepage'. I then assigned a field called 'Introduction'.

My instinct is that any content applied to this 'Introduction' field should be different depending on which site was selected in the CP when adding and saving the content. So I can have a different homepage per website... because they use different index.twig which are loaded depending on url.

No... what actually happens is that any content I add or change in the homepage entry under 'Site One' in the CP immediately overwrites whatever was in 'Site Two' homepage entry and vice-versa!?

I did see a (untried) solution from a couple of years ago which was to create 'Homepage One', 'Homepage Two', ... and only assign each to the appropriate 'Site'. But surely if Craft is loading a template based on a url and an assigned index.twig via 'siteHandle' directory, one 'Homepage' under each 'Site' should work?

Thank you for any explanation and/or guidance :)

Answer 1

What you're actually looking for here are the translation settings. These are stored against each field: in a multi-site installation, each field can be "translated" per site, per language or per site-group. ("Translated" is perhaps a confusing label here if your two sites are technically in the same language).

Set your Introduction field to be translatable for each site and it will be able to store unique content for each site.

This approach gives us lots of flexibility to have some fields with shared content and others with unique content, which cuts down the amount of duplicate editorial effort considerably on large multi-site installations where, for example, each site may want to use the same banner image but have different captions etc.