How to manage multi site using dispatcher in CQ / WEM

Use Case:

1) You have multi language site and you want to have different dispatcher configuration for them
2) Activating pages under english site should not flush pages under french site for example
3) I have different URL for each site (for example en.mysite.com and fr.mysite.com)

Solution:

At Publish Instance

First of all, In order to manage multi domain multi language site, You should have proper mapping rule within CQ. Please see http://dev.day.com/content/kb/home/cq5/CQ5SystemAdministration/HowToMapDomains.html for that

Now what this is going to do is, make sure that your links are properly written when you open any page under different domain.

Example of sample /etc/map

map
  +-- http
    +-- any_geometrixx.de (nodetyp: sling:Mapping)
        property: internalRedirect : /content/geometrixx/de.html
        property: sling:match : .*.*geometrixx.de.(4503|80)+/$
    +-- libs (nodetyp: sling:Mapping)
          property: internalRedirect: /libs
      +-- etc (nodetyp: sling:Mapping)
        +-- designs (nodetyp: sling:Mapping)
            property: internalRedirect: /etc/designs
    +-- any_geometrixx.en (nodetyp: sling:Mapping)
        property: internalRedireect: /content/geometrixx/en.html
        property: sling:match : .*.*geometrixx.en.(4503|80)+/$
      +-- libs (nodetyp: sling:Mapping)
          property: internalRedirect: /libs
      +-- etc (nodetyp: sling:Mapping)
        +-- designs (nodetyp: sling:Mapping)
            property: internalRedirect: /etc/designs


At Dispatcher

First of all you have to associate dispatcher handler with each incoming domain. You can use Name Virtual Host for this

better to create different farm for different domain

# Each farm configures a set of load balanced renders (i.e. remote servers)
/farms
  {
       $include farm*.any
  }

Suppose you have two farms,

farm_site1.any

farm_site2.any

Then you will have virtual host setting as,

 /virtualhosts
      {
 
      "*site1*"
      }

 /renders
      {
       $include "renders.any"
      }

/cache
   /docroot "<Global Doc root>/site1"

And

/virtualhosts

      {
 
      "*site2*"
      }

    /renders
      {
       $include "renders.any"
      }

  /cache
    /docroot "<Global Doc root>/site2"

You can have same or different renderers for different site.

Now at your virtual host setting you will configure different doc root for different site

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName site1.com
    #This is to handle dev enviornments
    ServerAlias *.site1.com
    DocumentRoot <Global Doc root>/site1
    Include <Configurations specific to site1>
 
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName site2.com
    #This is to handle dev enviornments
    ServerAlias *.site2.com
    DocumentRoot <Global Doc root>/site2
    Include <Configurations specific to site2>
 
</VirtualHost>
DocumentRoot <Global Doc root>

Now to handle dispatcher flush request for specific site path, You can have rule like,


SetEnvIfNoCase CQ-Path ^/content/site1 hostnameforfarm=site1.com
SetEnvIfNoCase CQ-Path ^/content/site2 hostnameforfarm=site2.com
RequestHeader set Host %{hostnameforfarm}e env= hostnameforfarm

Now above rule will set the host name for dispatcher based on {CQ-Path} in flush request. That mean if some thing under site1 get activated site2 cache will NOT be flushed.

I know there could be many variation to this, I just gave basic example. Let me know if you have more questions.