Basecamp Style Subdomains with ExpressionEngine

20 December 2010 8 Comments

Today cityzenllc asked a question on Twitter about setting up EE w/subdomains.

The “Basecamp Style Subdomains With CodeIgniter” over at NetTuts was tweeted and retweeted all over the place, or maybe just twice, but anyway – this is supereasy in EE, and can be done by adding just a couple of lines to index.php:

if($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] == 'login.example.com')
{
    $assign_to_config['site_url'] = 'http://login.example.com/';
    $req = strtolower(trim($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '/'));
    if($req == '' || substr($req, 0, 9 ) == 'index.php')
    {
        $assign_to_config['template_group'] = 'login';
        $assign_to_config['template'] = 'index';
    }
}

What the above snippet of code will do is check if the current URL the user is on is ‘login.example.com’ – if it is it will change the ‘site_url’ variable to override the default one (so that {path=”} etc will use that URL. Also it will make sure the ‘index’ template in the template group called ‘login’ is used (if the user is not on a subpage that is).

Of course you could add all kinds of magic here – having Apache accept all and every subdomain, fetching a specific template group and adding the subdomain to the global variables ($assign_to_config['global_vars']) .. for instance to implement a username.example.com solution. You could even throw some .htaccess in the mix if you really needed it

How have you solved this with ExpressionEngine?

Tags: ExpressionEngine

8 Responses to “Basecamp Style Subdomains With ExpressionEngine”

Aaron Waldon 20 December 2010 at 20:23 #

I was just looking into this functionality last week for an upcoming project. That is a very simple solution. Very nice writeup Bjørn!

Reply
Bjørn Børresen 22 December 2010 at 10:59 #

Thanks Aaron!

Reply

vinay 9 January 2011 at 16:08 #

Thanks Bjorn. I am creating a location based sub domain website in EE.

Your code really helps. I modified it to

$subdomain_arr = explode('.', $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], 2);
    $subdomain_name = $subdomain_arr[0];
    if(!empty($subdomain_name))
    {
        $assign_to_config['site_url'] = 'http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].'/';
        $req = strtolower(trim($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '/'));
        if($req == '' || substr($req, 0, 9 ) == 'index.php')
        {
            $assign_to_config['template_group'] = 'home';
            $assign_to_config['template'] = 'index';
        }
    }

Robert 29 April 2011 at 06:34 #

I seem to be having trouble. I’ve used Vinay’s adaption, but it seems that my hosting is taking over when you enter a subdomain.

Am I missing something?

arenowengaged.com is the URL I’m working on.

Thanks, Robert

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Robert 29 April 2011 at 06:57 #

I should probably add some information…

Again, the URL is http://www.arenowengaged.com

This is a sub page which I’ve created to test this code: http://www.arenowengaged.com/index.php/Sub_Domains/leeandjess

Thanks

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zam 30 April 2011 at 09:30 #

hey thats a good way of doing sub domains, good codin’

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Robert 21 July 2011 at 19:11 #
I ended up getting everything to work. However, I had to modify what Vinay did just a little. Here’s what I came up with:

$subdomain_arr = explode(‘.’, $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], 2); $page_direction = explode(‘/’, $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);

if (!empty($page_direction[1])) { $thePage = $page_direction[1]; } else { $thePage = ‘index’; }

$subdomain_name = $subdomain_arr[0]; if(($subdomain_name != ‘www’) && (!empty($subdomain_name))) {
```
$assign_to_config['site_url'] = 'http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].'/';
$req = strtolower(trim($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '/'));
if($req == '' || substr($req, 0, 9 ) == 'index.php') {
```
```
$assign_to_config['template_group'] = $subdomain_name;
$assign_to_config['template'] = $thePage;
//echo $thePage;
```
}

}

Reply
Jeff Williams 20 May 2012 at 20:52 #

Awesome, I am going to use this on my site http://weblance.com as we ar ebuilding a project management tool.

Reply