Taxonomies per Site in Multisite Instance

Hi all,

The next Sitefinity version will contain option to have different Taxonomy content for the different sites in a Multisite instance. Version 1 of the wireframes is here.

Currently, if you have taxonomy Categories with items related to clothing, say: “leather”, “cotton”, “nylon”,etc., those same categories will appear on all sites in Sitefinity. So, if you want to create a site to display books, and you want to have categories such as: “educational”, “professional”, “art” etc. you cannot use Categories for that, and you need to create a new custom taxonomy.

Sitefinity 8.0 will solve this problem by giving you the option, when browsing a given site, to set a taxonomy to differ on this site only. So, in the example above, in the context of the Books Site the user can set Categories to have different content (book related) in the site.

A preview of how this will look for Categories is here. In the Actions menu there is option “Set categories for this site only”. Once this option is selected, the categories created on this site can be used and displayed on this site only. In time, you can decide to revert your action and make taxonomies the same as for other sites. In the Actions menu there will be an option “Delete categories for this site only” which you can use for that.

Below are some questions as to how you plan to use this feature on which we’ll need your feedback:

1. Once you set a different taxonomy for a given site, do you want to use this taxonomy on other sites as well? So, in the example above, if you create a second Books Site, do you want to reuse the books related categories from the first Book Site? How common is this scenario in your experience?
2. Do you see the need to be able to set up just a few categories to be different on a given site? So, in the example above, you can have “professional” category shared with both the Clothing and Books site, and then the rest of the categories should differ. In this case, only some, and not all categories, is different. How common case is that?

Any other scenarios related to the use of categories in Multisite instance will be of help. Your feedback will help us design the feature in the best possible way.

We look forward to receiving your comments.

Hi Kali,

Sorry to hijack this but I want to know if 8.0 is finally going to have the ability to do true hierarchical content items with dynamic modules. It was something you mentioned would be done in 7.0 on a thread similar to this but I have yet to see that implemented and we're now on version 8. Can you confirm that's still on your radar. We need the ability to be able to create a content item and set it as a parent all while maintaining a real hierarchical relationship (ie. the parent can't then be assigned to be a child of it's child, like you currently can). Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Having taxonomies per site would help me tremendously! We are managing Sitefinity instances with 70++ sites in them and have a huge neat for taxonomies to be separated out.  Please hurry!

It should work like the Dynamic Modules do. If I want to share a provider with Multiple sites I can, if not use the default of that sites custom.  That site should only be able to use its own taxonomies and any that are "shared".

I think for "tags"(flat taxonomy) dont have mush use for sharing, but i wont say that its NOT need.  Sharing some Categories could be useful. 

Its great to hear that you guys are working on this! As to your questions, both 1 and 2 are not something I see much use on our context. We will either have a common "shared" taxonomy across all sites or specific ones for each site.

 One thing that I'd like to suggest is that you really have a concept of setting a taxonomy for "all", meaning that when a new site is created, that site will inherit all these "core" or "shared" taxonomies. Or perhaps make it in the process of creating a new site you ask which taxonomies you want to inherit.

Thanks so much for looking into this feature, it will pretty much allow us to consider switching to a multi-site architecture.

Hi all,

just writing to let  you know that Sitefinity 8.0 Beta was released and it contains the option to set taxonomies per site. Please, take a look and let us know what you think. Download link and release notes are here: www.sitefinity.com/.../sitefinity-8.0-beta-announced

Regards,
Kalina