So I’ve been trying to read up on this and while some seem to have had some success, I’m at somewhat of a loss on how to do it. We are building a (v9.4.7) multisite of two sibling domains, sharing a custom theme developed at the same time (so page types and templates are added as needed, the theme doesn’t have an existing blueprint for this).
The site building has been started with the theme on the primary domain and now that we want to start fleshing out the structures of each site, we’re finding we can’t use the page types created on the default site on the other one, that Concrete guided us through creating as a whole another type of site. The existing page types also can’t be duplicated on the secondary site’s side through copying or adding manually using the same handles, because those handles are taken by the originals.
I tried setting the secondary site’s siteTypeID to 1 in the Sites table as described here and that does enable adding pages of primary site’s types to the secondary site but that still doesn’t make the page types list properly for both sites in Dashboard > Pages & Themes > Page Types and also there’s the fear that hacks circumventing what the UI is guiding you to do like this might have some adverse effects down the line.
I also had the idea of duplicating the site types with prefixed handles on the secondary site’s side but I would like to avoid actual duplication if at all possible.
So, shared page types between two peas in a multisite pod. How do?
I think there might be some miscommunication here. By setting sitetypeID to 1 for the second site, you’re making it so that the second site adopts the page types of the first (default) site type. At that point, none of the page types used in the second site type that you made would be used for the second site, because it is no longer of that type.
In general, the “type of site” you’re building is what you should use to determine whether you want a second site type or not. So if the two sites you’re building are very similar, it makes sense that you would want them to use the same ‘site type’ which would cause them to share page types, skeletons, etc… So you’re on the right track by setting the site type to the initial default type, because you’ve already started building your default site out with this site type.
In a perfect world, you’d probably keep the original site mostly empty, and create a second site type entirely, and use that site type for both sites, which would be new - sibling site a and sibling site b. However, since content build-out has already started I would recommend proceeding with updating the secondary site’s siteTypeID to 1 and proceed from there. I’m really not sure what “still doesn’t make the page types list properly for both sites in Dashboard > Pages & Themes > Page Types” means. The way you’re describing it, this update is working properly. Additionally, don’t worry about having to set this field by a slightly hacky way: you’re right that it isn’t ideal, but this is mostly as confusing as it is because we have to support both complex multisite setups and making site types and skeletons, etc… understandable and mostly hidden out of the box
Thanks so much for the reply and clarification, Andrew. Any inconsistencies in my explanation can probably be put down to sheer confusion around the sparsely documented topic, the layers involved and blindly testing whether hacking it like this would work. (Still a little unsure about the skeletons’ function but maybe I don’t need to dig into that with this project.)
I took your advice of not worrying about the method of achieving it, dared to make the db change in Staging and it looks like I have the page types now working across the two very samey sites. Right on time for content sprint.
Great! Glad to hear it. Yeah, you’re not wrong about it being sparsely documented: the differences between sites and site types and how to use them is pretty in the weeds. Glad to hear it’s working in time to be useful.
