Multiple sites on Umbraco - sharing content - iis

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?

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.

Related

How to have two root websites on one IIS server

I have a website on the IIS as the default website. It is in "c:\interpub\wwwroot". When I request "www.mysite1.com", I get to this site.
Now I want to add a second website on the same IIS server. I want to store it in "c:\mysecondsite". When I request "www.mysite2.com", I wish to get to this second site.
NOTE: I don't want the second site to become an application inside the first site. In other words, I don't want to access the second site using "www.mysite1.com/mysite2".
How do I do it?

How to redirect one page to a different URL than the rest of the HTTP redirect IIS8

First off, apologies for not knowing the nomenclature for what I'm looking for, I'm not typically a Windows web admin.
I have a SharePoint website which contains several subsites. We also have several alternate URLs that point to specific pages, and some of those alternate URLs have friendly URLs which also redirect to other specific pages. We're in the process of migrating from a SharePoint 2007 site to this one, and in the process, I'm trying to remove our reliance on our registrar for handling some of this redirection, because it is apparently not a free service.
Currently our registrar does the following redirects:
http://alias1.tld/* redirects to http://subsite1.ca/page1
http://alias1.tld/friendly redirects to http://subsite1.ca/page2
http://alias2.tld/ redirects to http://subsite1.ca/page3
I know I can accomplish the first and second by setting the sites up in IIS, and using the HTTP Redirect function, but I'm not sure how I can do the second one. In Apache this would be easy, but I'm not sure what I'm looking for here.
Is this something that should be handled within SharePoint, and have that take care of redirecting alias1.tld/friendly to the specific page, or is this something I need to setup in IIS? Is this what URL rewrite is for, or is there a different IIS way to do this?
I'm not sure that this is the best way to do it, but I got things working how I wanted them. Here's what I ended up doing:
Create a new subsite on subsite1 to give me the URL subsite1.ca/subsubsite
Create a redirect from alias1.tld to subsite1.ca/subsite
Create 2 pages for the new subsite. One for the default page and one to use to redirect to page2. Both pages are redirects, Default points to Page1, the second points to Page2.
Set the subsite to use Managed Navigation for global and current through Site Settings > Navigation, and created a default term set by selecting the new subsite in the list and then clicking Create Term Set, then clicking OK.
Then created a term store for the one page that needs to be handled differently by going to Site Settings > Term Store Management. Click on the Term Set created in the last step, then select New Term. On the Term-Driven Pages tab, create the friendly URL and then select the target page, which is the redirect page created in step 3, then click Save.

Updating an existing website

I've been asked by a family friend to completely overhaul the website for their business. I've designed my own website, so I know some of the basics of web design and development.
To work on their website from my own home, I know I'll need to FTP into their server, and therefore I'll need their FTP credentials, as well as their CMS credentials. I'm meeting with them in a couple of days and I don't want to look like a moron! Is there anything else I need to ask them for during our first meeting (aside from what they want in their new site, etc.) before I start digging into it?
Thanks!
From an SEO point of view, you should be concerned with 301 redirects as (i suppose) some or all URL adressess will change (take a different name, be removed and etc)
So, after you`ve created a new version of the site - and before you put it online - you should go ahead and list all "old site" URLs and decide, preferably for each one, it's new status (unchanged or redirected and if so - to what URL).
Mind that even is the some content will not re-appear on the new site, you still have to redirect the URL (say to HomePage) to keep link juice and SERP rankings.
Also, for a larger sites, (especially dynamic sites) try looking for URL patterns for bulk redirects. For example, if you see that google indexes 1,000 index.php?search=[some-key-word] pages, you don`t need to redirect each one individually as these are probably just search result pages that can be grouped with REGEX to be redirected to main search result page.
To index "old site" URLs you should:
a. site:domainname.com in Google (then set the SERP to 100 results and scaped manually of with Xpath)
b. Xenu or other site crawler (some like screamingfrog) to get a list of all URLs.
c. combine the lists in excel and remove all duplicates.
If you need help with 301 redirects you can start with this link:
http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php/
If the website is static, knowing html, css and javascript along with FTP credentials is enough for you to get started. However if the site is dynamic interactive and database driven, you may need to ask if they want to use a php, In that case you might end up building this site in wordpress.
If you are going to design the website from scratch then also keep this point in mind.. Your friend might have hosted this website at somewhere (i.e. hosting provider). You should get its hosting control panel details as well which will help to manage the website (including database, email, FTP, etc.).

Sharing single application across a 2 subdomains in IIS7

I have an application that is currently deployed (ex. www.example.com ). However, now we have a "secure" subdomain, which will take all of the requests that need to be encrypted (ex. secure.example.com). The site that is at www.example.com is currently mapped to C:\inetpub\example.com\wwwroot\, and I've mapped secure.example.com to C:\inetpub\example.com\wwwroot\secure.
However, since secure.example.com was setup as a new website within the IIS Manager, when the secure site is visited, it displays an error since there is no web.config associated with this website; however, this is the way I want it since I want this to be a part of the application that is in the parent directory.
I think what you really meant to do was just right click on the web site for example.com and edit the bindings. In there you can add host names to that site.
Make sure you add them for port 443 which is SSL.
Map both the IIS virtual directories/web sites to the same directory, and check that are both using the same IIS application name.
(Not tried this, but can't recall seeing anything to say it would not work.)

IIS7 startup site

I have a Windows 2008 Server with IIS7 on it and a web page running under the name, let's say myApplication. I have a domain name that points to the IP of my server, let's say myApplication.com.
In order to access my application I have to enter http://myApplication.com/myApplication.
If I write http://myApplication.com/ I arrive to the IIS7 start page. Is there a way (besides rewriting the iisstart.htm to make a JavaScript or meta-data redirect) to automatically open the myApplication when someone enters "http://myApplication.com/"?
What I would like is the following:
The user enters in the browser: "http://myApplication.com/"
He/she is taken to "http://myApplication.com/myApplication"
In the URL bar of the browser only "http://myApplication.com/" shows and everything inside the application is relative to this URL.
Generally when I configure IIS, I set the properties for the "default web site" to a folder that doesn't contain anything, then create individual entries within IIS for each web site. For example, you would create a new entry for "MyApplication.com" and set its home directory to the proper folder on the server that contains your root files (usually c:\inetpub\wwwroot\myapplication.com\ but it could be anywhere you like).
It sounds as if you have created a folder for your application, but do not have a specific entry in IIS configured to handle the requests and load files from the proper folder.
If you have a dedicated IP address for the application, be sure to specify that IP within the site settings for that site. If you're using a single IP for multiple sites, configure the IP AND hostnames/domains that will be used to access that site so IIS will know which site entries belong to which domains and where to route the requests.

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