Multisite license, join 6 existing sites

Good day all, I have a customer which currently has 6 websites on version 5.3 and is expecting a quick upgrade to the multisite license way of things.

This means I have 6 instances, 6 databases, 6 sets of DLLs, I have been diligent in keeping all the sites sync'd regarding DLLs and resources like images, js, css, etc...

Can anyone share their experiences/steps of what is the process of "joining" these instances into the multisite paradigm ?

Let's say there are some 100-200 pages on each site, what do I need to do to ?

I installed the 6.3 beta to try out the feature, and its really easy to create a new site, kudos on that!
but I want to have a sense on what it'll take me effort-wise to integrate 6 separate sites into multisite to take advantage of content sharing, same user base, template sharing, etc, etc.

It occurs to me I could use the sync module to sync the data from an existing live site into a brand new site on the multisite side ??

In other words, consider my current live site like a "dev instance" and deploy/sync everything into the multisite environment ??? does that make sense / could it work ??

Hello,

We have answered you in the support ticket you have opened. I will share our answer with the community:

For now there is no option to combine six different projects in a single Multisite solution. In order to achieve your desired scenario you can try to migrate the content from your websites to your new Multisite project.

I will outline some ideas below that we have tested and work when migrating content from one Sitefinity database to another regardless of the version. However please note that Pages and Templates cannot be migrated this way as it is not a supported scenario so you will have to do them manually.

RSS feeds - This is a really simple way to migrate content from one db to another. Simply create an RSS feed in the source site for lets say News items, then in the destination site import that feed and map it to News items. Sitefinity will take care of the rest. The available content you can transfer this way is:

• News
• Blog posts
• Events
• Lists
• Any type of dynamic content (Module builder modules)

Custom providers - This one requires some programming and configurations setup, but it is a more reliable way to transfer content from one database to another by utilizing our API and will cover all content (except Pages and Templates). Here is a blog post that describes the process. Once the custom provider pulls the content successfully you can instantiate the managers with this provider to call the items from the source database and then instantiate another manager with the default provider for the destination database like so:

Prerequisites

Before you can use site synchronization, there are the following prerequisites:

• To access Staging & Syncing, you must be assigned to the Administrator’s role. For more information, see Users, roles, and permissions.
• The Sitefinity version must be the same, you cannot synchronize between two different builds.
• You must use the same license on both target and source servers.
• The target and the source databases must be the same. Sitefinity synchronizes only the content, not the database itself. Before you setup synchronization, copy the database, so that it is the same on both locations.
• Except for the connection string, the configuration of the sites you want to sync must be the same (the content of all .config files).
• All sites must have the same backend and frontend languages. For more information, see Languages.
• If you have multisite license, you must have the same sites, configured on both the target and the source servers. For more information, see Multiple site management.
• You must have enabled basic authentication on both the source and the target servers. The basic authentication is enabled by adding claims authentication HTTP module (SitefinityClaimsAuthenticationModule), which must be added by default in new projects. For more information, see Authentication and single sign-on.
• Make sure that all inactive modules on the source server are also inactivated on the target server.