Best practice for MicroSite in TeamSite/LiveSite

cgrantham

Environment: TeamSite/LiveSite 7.3.2 (Windows), Java.

 

I am trying to build a microsite that will use the same server name in the default.site file as the main website, but I am finding that this causes problems. Invalid site file in the LiveSite logs, etc.

 

So what I want (ideally) is to have 2 distinct sites (preferably in seperate branches in TS) that can use the same hostname just with different url aliases so the main website would use:

www.<mydomain>.com/

and the microsite would use

www.<mydomain>.com/<alias>

 

Is it actually possible to have 2 sites on the same LiveSite server?

And if so, what is the best practice for setting this microsite up from both a TeamSite and LiveSite perspective?

 

Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.

 

 

Rick Poulin

It's possible but not provided by OOTB functionality. There's two parts to this.

 

The first part is easy -- you need to set up rewrite rules so that incoming requests get internally forwarded to LiveSite in such a way that it will render what you want. You can either do this in Apache / IIS, or you can use a Java Servlet Filter like Tuckey. (If you want to get fancy, you can build one that reads from LiveSite-provided configs, but that's overkill for a handful of microsites)

 

The second part is 'hard' and not really supported. What you'd want to do is change the behaviour of $PAGE_LINK[] and related to output /micrositeroot/hello/world.page instead of just /hello/world.page. I've done this in two ways. The one that's technically supported is to create a custom page token and stop using $PAGE_LINK[] in your microsite -- obviously not ideal. The other is to subclass the RuntimeRequestContext on the runtime side via Spring injection to override the getPageLink() and related methods. That's not trivial, and not strictly supported, but the user experience for your authors is much better.

 

TL;DR: If this is a one-time deal, you might be better off getting a different domain or putting it in the same branch as your main site.