Hi Josh

Could you offer your advice and wisdom on the following scenario.

I have an installation that will have a large number of sites. For example domain.com, a.domain.com, b.domain.com, c.domain.com etc. I would like each site to share a common theme (templates, options & design). So far so good, I'd just clone each site from a common theme.

The problem arises when I want to maintain some aspect of the theme (template, option, style) and then have the alterations apply to each of the sites. It would appear that BM creates an individual copy of the theme in the pages directory of each site.

How would you approach this to minimise the amount of manual work in maintaining a single theme across sites?

Hi Dale,

Yes, you're right. When a theme is applied to a site, the theme files are applied just once -- any subsequent changes you make to the theme won't be applied until you manually apply the theme again.

The best way to cope with that is to use a single separate external CSS style sheet for all your sites. You could set it up, for example, at example.com/all-site-styles.css and then link to that external style sheet as described here:

http://globalmoxie.com/help/faq/design/styles/custom-css.shtml#sheet

You would then use that style sheet to display the images for the sites' design, etc. That would at least cover you for styles.

As for the templates themselves, the best way to go for the situation you describe is to change Big Medium's default templates. You can edit/update those files here:

moxiedata/templates/site_templates/HTML

Then, remove all custom templates/themes from your sites, and all sites will use the default template files that you have in that directory. It's still not ideal, though, because you'd still have to manually rebuild all sites after making that change.

That's about the best I can suggest. Hope that helps!
Josh

Thanks, that's what I was looking for.