Can I host multiple stores in Magento Community Edition?

Question

Can I host multiple stores in Magento Community Edition? And how to automatically create a subdomain for each new store when you configure it?

Answer 1

Yes, you can run multiple sites from the Magento community. The Magento official blog actually just posted a post about this that you can check out: http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/from-the-support-team-multi-site-domain-name-setup/

The bottom line is that you need to create a new store in the admin backend. If you are not using the same product catalog for both sites, you will also need to create another “root category” in the catalog category setting and specify this category as the correct root for the second repository.

Finally, the subdomain problem. Depending on which server settings you use, this can be a difficult part. If you have full control over the server (the best idea, since running Magento on shared hosts is a bit problematic in terms of resources), add vhosts to apache and set the variables MAGE_RUN_CODE and MAGE_RUN_TYPE in the .htaccess environment for your site.

I do not see any easy way to set up a subdomain when creating a site. You will need to write apache to create hosts and modify .htaccess, which will require some non-trivial development to do this from the Magento website.

A more detailed answer is at the other end of this link. Hope this helps.

Thanks Joe

Answer 2

Yes, you can run multiple stores for multiple customers on the same Magento CE platform. I recommend the AITOC Advanced Permissions module. There are a few caveats (you may have to expand the module yourself to add some features to some areas, for example, the "Shares" section does not apply to CE applications with or without AITOC).

It should also be noted that the AITOC module is by no means cheap, and if you use several clients on it, there is a pretty good chance that you will need a “unlimited” (that is, the most expensive) license. Good luck