In this talk you'll learn about what options Neos CMS has to create multi site solutions with great performance and usability.

1. One Neos - Many Websites
Sebastian Helzle
Neos Conference 2018

2. Sebastian Helzle
• Product Owner
@ punkt.de / Karlsruhe
• Neos CMS Core Team Member
• @sebobo

3. What will be discussed in this talk
• Why do we want to have many sites in one Neos
• What does Neos offer to make multisite setups easy
• How to create a multisite
• Summary
• Time for questions

4. Why do I talk about this topic?

5. Motivation for having multi site setups

6. The main benefits
• Benefits for development & maintenance
• Optimized editor processes
• Launch new sites and microsites with ease
• Business (money) advantages

7. Benefits for development & maintenance
• Only one codebase to be taken care of
• Increased security
• One server setup
• One integration pipeline
• Features roll out to all sites at the same time
• And can be limited with feature flags
• Optimize one site and get a benefits in all of them

8. Optimize editorial process
• Have reusable content between sites
• Have same usability and processes on all sites
• Only one login is needed
• Cross site navigation menus possible
• Reuse assets like images, documents and others

9. Launch new sites and microsites with ease
• Work on them in parallel to existing pages
• Manage sites and domains in the backend
• Secure the domains until Go-Live with an authentication
• Then:
• Turn of authentication and go live
• If necessary map live domain to server and then go live

10. Business benefits
• Reduced longterm cost through lower development & maintenance efforts
• But slightly increased initial cost for the first two sites
• More up-to-date content with improved editorial process
• Reduced time to market with new sites
• Consistent corporate identity

11. Neos offers many advantages in multi site setups

12. Reuse content from other sites
• Examples:
• Content for privacy, license or legal texts
• Banners & advertisements
• Records of employees & authors
• Categories & tags
• Works with any reference property
• Neos will show the source by the domain

13. Change the starting point & reference any page
myPageReference:
type: reference
ui:
label: i18n
inspector:
editorOptions:
placeholder: i18n
startingPoint: '/'
nodeTypes:
- ‚Neos.Neos:Document'

14. Or use one site as global content hub
myContentReferences:
type: references
ui:
label: i18n
inspector:
editorOptions:
placeholder: i18n
startingPoint: ‚/sites/contenthub‘
nodeTypes:
- ‚Neos.Neos:Content‘

15. Sitegeist.Taxonomy
• Cross-site categorization & related
content system
• Lives inside it’s own content tree
• Still experimental!
• https://github.com/sitegeist/
Sitegeist.Taxonomy

16. Hint:
Give every element a fitting title.
You will find it much faster!

17. Using content dimensions for multisites
• Have a master site
• Use dimensions to customize content on children sites
• Needs mapping of domains to dimensions
• Could get more complex with multiple languages at the same time
• See case study by CORE4 (and ask Bernhard Schmitt @nezaniel)

18. Handling site specific configurations
• Multiple Settings files in site packages will override each other
• Could be solved with separate Context per site but has drawbacks
• Core caching is not shared
• Needs more configuration on the webserver
• Context must be set correctly for console commands
• Put global configuration into one Settings.yaml
• Have site specific configuration in the site node
• Use a custom nodetype for the homepages

19. Some examples
• Social media links
• Parameters for webservices
• Site specific footer links
• Config for frontend plugins

20. Example: Rootpage nodetype
'My.Vendor:RootPage':
superTypes:
'Neos.Neos:Document': true
ui:
label: i18n
icon: ‚icon-home'
properties:
twitterUrl: ...
companyName: ...
contactFormRecipient: ...
theme: ...
apiToken: ...
trackingId: ...

21. Theming and customizations
• Use homepage nodes to set themes & customize
• Change logo
• Change typography, colors, iconset, …
• Use 3rd party packages to extend Neos multisite
capabilities

22. CM.Neos.ThemeModule
• Customize colors & typography
• Supports multisites
• Add custom SCSS
• Add additional custom settings
• https://github.com/coders-market/
CM.Neos.ThemeModule

23. Separate site handling if necessary
• Use roles which are locked into one site
• Use dynamic policies which match users to sites
• Match asset collections with sites to keep assets
separated

24. Some notes on performance
• Many small sites behave similar to one bigger site
• Neos can handle a lot of content, no matter where and scales nicely
• Real project with 8 sites containing ~50.000 nodes is no problem
• 100.000s of nodes should work too
• Future Neos developments will make this even more scalable
• Site selection in backend might be harder to use with > 30 sites
• Could be optimized easily in the future

25. Let’s create a multisite

26. Start by creating a new site in the Sites Management module

27. Create a blank site in your existing site package

28. The new site will need a bit of configuration

29. Configure your site and add a new domain

30. Set the domain you want to use

31. Map the domain in the web server onto your Neos installation

32. Test your new site 🎉

33. Other ways to create a new site
• Use the site management module to create a site package with a new site

34. Use the kickstart command from cli „flow site:create“

35. Notes about creating sites
• Creating a site package is easier with the package „neos/site-
kickstarter“
• You can also build a site package manually if you know what you do
• You will miss out a useful boilerplate
• If you create a new site package you have to import the new site manually
• Don’t forget that additional site packages should depend on the main one
• Don’t forget that Settings.yaml files have one hierarchy

36. Summary
• Neos is already well prepared to handle many sites
• Many use cases are already solvable
• Some use cases need small adjustments
• Performance will continuously get better with future Neos versions
• Start using the feature and forward use cases and experiences to the core team
• Contribute or sponsor changes that could benefit all projects

37. Questions?
@sebobo
helzle@punkt.de

38. Sources
• https://github.com/coders-market/CM.Neos.ThemeModule
• https://github.com/sitegeist/Sitegeist.Taxonomy