[QUOTE=d2d4j;29049]Hi Synthetisoft
Good question, and I have read it a few times, to try to fully understand your question, or rather, exactly what your trying to acheive.
If I understood correctly, which I am sorry if I have not, but I believe your wanting user1.example.com to use document root of example.com
If so, why not use a hook to change the document root of the subdomain to example.com in the vhost file for the subdomain, or there is alias (scriptalias), which I’m sure you have seen.
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/urlmapping.html#outside
so, if using alias, I am thinking you could add this to the Skel, or create a hook to add it.
Ofcourse, if your htaccess works as you expect, then thats lovely and please ignore my post
I hope that helps a little and sorry if I am wrong
Many thanks
John
Files Outside the DocumentRoot
There are frequently circumstances where it is necessary to allow web access to parts of the filesystem that are not strictly underneath the DocumentRoot. Apache offers several different ways to accomplish this. On Unix systems, symbolic links can bring other parts of the filesystem under the DocumentRoot. For security reasons, Apache will follow symbolic links only if the Options setting for the relevant directory includes FollowSymLinks or SymLinksIfOwnerMatch.
Alternatively, the Alias directive will map any part of the filesystem into the web space. For example, with
Alias /docs /var/web
the URL http://www.example.com/docs/dir/file.html will be served from /var/web/dir/file.html. The ScriptAlias directive works the same way, with the additional effect that all content located at the target path is treated as CGI scripts.
For situations where you require additional flexibility, you can use the AliasMatch and ScriptAliasMatch directives to do powerful regular expression based matching and substitution. For example,
ScriptAliasMatch ^/~([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/cgi-bin/(.+) /home/$1/cgi-bin/$2
will map a request to http://example.com/~user/cgi-bin/script.cgi to the path /home/user/cgi-bin/script.cgi and will treat the resulting file as a CGI script.
User Directories
Traditionally on Unix systems, the home directory of a particular user can be referred to as ~user/. The module mod_userdir extends this idea to the web by allowing files under each user’s home directory to be accessed using URLs such as the following.
http://www.example.com/~user/file.html
For security reasons, it is inappropriate to give direct access to a user’s home directory from the web. Therefore, the UserDir directive specifies a directory underneath the user’s home directory where web files are located. Using the default setting of Userdir public_html, the above URL maps to a file at a directory like /home/user/public_html/file.html where /home/user/ is the user’s home directory as specified in /etc/passwd.
There are also several other forms of the Userdir directive which you can use on systems where /etc/passwd does not contain the location of the home directory.
Some people find the “~” symbol (which is often encoded on the web as %7e) to be awkward and prefer to use an alternate string to represent user directories. This functionality is not supported by mod_userdir. However, if users’ home directories are structured in a regular way, then it is possible to use the AliasMatch directive to achieve the desired effect. For example, to make http://www.example.com/upages/user/file.html map to /home/user/public_html/file.html, use the following AliasMatch directive:
AliasMatch ^/upages/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/?(.*) /home/$1/public_html/$2[/QUOTE]
I will try these things (Both what I mentioned and your ideas). So just to clarify, I’m selling my platform as a white label service to companies who will have many users and whose users may collide with other companies who use my platform’s users. The strange thing about what I’m doing is that the purposes of giving each of my site’s users a subdomain from which they can access my platform/site are 2:
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So that when the user visits their subdomain and my site loads, it automatically associates the visit with the correct account by the subdomain they have visited. This way, their custom settings are loaded and authentication is checked only against their users. Sort of a white label thing.
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So that they can create a cname at their domain. So let’s say their site is example.com. They could create a cname at their site that points service.example.com to user1.mysite.com. That way, white labeling is also reflected in the URL when the customer’s users login.
It’s sort of a nested thing where I’m proving this service to companies. I’ve seen other platforms do this same thing offering subdomains you can point a cname to. Anyway, the flow goes like this… A company comes to my site and wants to use my platform. The company will have many users. Conceivably, many users from Company A using my service might also be users of Company B using my service. Also, each company has their own settings on my platform so that when their users login via their subdomain or cname, it loads the company’s styles, logo, and all manner of settings that only pertain to that company who rents that subdomain from me.
Like I said, I’ve seen this exact thing done many times. I’m just not sure exactly how they’ve handled it. You see though my need to provide subdomains (For the sake of cnames and white labeling) and also very important, that I do this all with one code base. I can’t go copying my whole platform around to every subdomain. That would be silly. I’ve also been debating with myself whether or not I should give each company their own MySQL tables for their users/settings/stats/whatever but that’s a whole different conversation.