Share data sources and presentation using the multisite feature

Version: 1.9

SXA lets you share styles, data sources, page designs, partial designs, and rendering variants between the sites within one tenant.

This can be convenient if you want to impose the styling of a master site on your local sites or if you simply want to be able to use data sources from other sites. For example, when you have a main site and many subsites and you want all sites to use the same styles, the same footer, and the same rendering variants, or if you want to share data sources, such as promos or videos, between your sites.

Make a site a shared site

It can be very convenient to arrange the styling of your sites by sharing the presentation of one master site. If you want to use a master site that imposes styles and rendering variants, you could consider having a master site that is not one of the publicly available sites but rather a container for the shared items.

To make a site a shared site:

  • In the Content Editor, navigate to the tenant, and in the Sharing section use the arrows to move the site that you want to share to the Selected pane.

    Sharing section in the Content Editor.

    In this example, the Master site is now a shared site. The other sites within the same tenant can now use presentation and data sources from the Master site.

    Note

    You can share as many sites as you want. However, if you are sharing more than one site, you must pay special attention to the naming of your site data because otherwise finding the correct item from the correct site can be difficult.

Use presentation items from a shared site

By default, adding a shared site implies that the following presentation items can be shared from that site: page designs, partial designs, rendering variants, styles, and themes.

To use a page design from a shared site:

  1. In the Experience Editor, navigate to the page that you want to assign a page design to.

  2. Click Pick Page Design, and from the drop-down list select the page design from the shared site. Similarly, if you want to map page designs to page templates, you can select the master site page designs as well as the page designs you created locally.

    Specify a page design.

You can use partial designs from your local site and from the shared site at the same time. This can be convenient when you, for example, want to use the header and footer of the shared site together with the local partial design for an article. To mix partial designs from local sites and shared sites you can add them to your page design.

For example, the following page uses partial designs from both the local site (Sub site Product Article) and the shared site (Footer and Header):

Example of usage of both local partial designs and shared site partial designs.

If you want to have global styling, you can delete all styles on all local sites and share the styles of the master site.

To use styles from a shared site only:

  • Navigate to the styles folder of your local site(s) and delete the styles. Now the only available styles to select are the ones from the master site.

    Master site styles example.

Use data sources from a shared site

Most SXA renderings are designed for reusability and pull data from data source items. This means that the content they display is not bound to the page on which they appear but is stored in data source items. By using the multisite feature, you can now share data sources between the sites of a tenant.

For example, for the Promo rendering, you can select promos from both the Master site as well as from your local site:

Select the Associated Content dialog box.
Note

To avoid users having to change the data source on all sites that a data source item appears on, you must set the security on data source items.

When available, you can select rendering variants from both the local and the shared site.

Select a variant from both local and shared site example.
Note

For consistent theming and styling of your site, you can delete the variants from the local sites and use the ones from the shared site only.

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