Multi Store Setup On Same Domain

Hi I was wanting to setup a multi-store setup on the same domain differentiating between the different stores by using the following:

www.example.com/en-us/
www.example.com/en-gb/
www.example.com/fr/
www.example.com/de/

I was reading this: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. ... sites.html
and it appeared to be the best way for what I am trying to achieve with my store.

I was wondering why opencart is unable to be setup like this as when I went into the admin to add another store I see this message:

"* Store URL:
Include the full URL to your store. Make sure to add '/' at the end. Example: http://www.yourdomain.com/path/
Don't use directories to create a new store. You should always point another domain or sub domain to your hosting."

Is there any way around this could I modify it so that it would work? Im not 100% sure why it makes a different if it is a different domain or dir as I have not looked at the code.

I am using the latest version of opencart 1.5..1.3 with no mods.

Any ideas would be really great. Thanks in advance.

Matthew

You could create subdomains like this: fr.example.com, gb.example.com . But opencart allready is multilanguage, so why do you need multistore for different languages?

Hi florinsith thanks for the reply.

The reason why I wanted it to be done that way with the folders was for better geo targetting and SEO.

I know a lot of larger stores operate this way. I don't simply want to use the multi-language within one site and would prefer not to use subdomains if at all possible.

Can anyone explain why it can be done on a sub domain but not on a folder? As a sub-domain would be created within a different folder to the main surely it makes no difference if the folder is within the main domain? Could it be purely a htaccess issue?

because when you make that subdomains , you point them to the same main folder , which is impossible if there are subfolders, and there is also the url problem. But you can set up multiple different stores in subfolders, you wont have the same admin , but I think they will still share the cart and others.

I guess that makes sense I guess florinsith I understand more that really it just checks the domain to see what store is wanting to be loaded. I must have got it mixed up with another multi store cart where I thought you copied the catalog part of the site over to the new folder be it a domain, sub-domain or sub folder. Maybe that was Magento or some other cart software.

Would I then be correct in thinking that the current multi-store system needs to be on the same server to access the document root of the main site?

As a side note I would have also thought that if it were in sub-folders a single SSL could be used for the entire site.

It maybe worth me rolling up my sleeves

Ok So I have had a quick play and created a folder on my server "de"

So i have example.com for the US in dollars and also example.com/de/ for the Deutsch in Euro.

I copied the config.php, index.php and also the catalog folder. I then updated the config.php changing the following settings to have "de" at the end:

HTTP_SERVER
HTTPS_SERVER
DIR_APPLICATION
DIR_LANGUAGE
DIR_TEMPLATE

I may need to change more or less not 100% yet.

I then went into the admin and added the new store with the example.com/de/ at the end. I also set the currency etc for the store here.

I cleared my cache and the two stores appear correctly. I had to assign a couple of products in the admin area for the "de" store but so far so good. I'm sure there is a stumbling block somewhere but as of yet i am yet to find it.

I will report further testing tomorrow when I am not as tired

Hi matt,

How is this going? I am setting up a cut-down version of OpenCart to be used basically as a search facility, with all the buying and pricing facilities etc etc removed.

I currently have my main domain http://www.example.co.uk which is a static website, and then there are links provided to the OpenCart search pages as http://www.example.co.uk/search1 and http://www.example.co.uk/search2.

I was going down the route of a fresh installation of OpenCart in each /search sub-folder, as well as separate databases, but then found the multi-store setting and looked further and then found your post.

The way you are looking at things seems to be suited perfectly to how I want things to work - one admin, one database, with products flagged to appear in search1, search2, search 3 etc etc.

One concern I have is how are you finding SEO with the OpenCart installation in sub-folders? Does Google still find everything OK across all sub-folders? Or perhaps sub-domains are the way to go.

As a side issue, I think many of these OS cart systems, of which I feel OpenCart is the best by some margin, that a trick is being missed in not making it easy for people to uninstall all shopping features in the back office ie: pricing, delivery, add to cart etc etc. but keeping everything searchable and viewable.

Be good to hear how you are finding things anyway, matt.

Jonathan