CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

The multi-site installation options page states the following:

The third alternative is for a shared contact database, but multiple, separate content interfaces. This may be used when an organization launches different sites for specific campaigns, or when organizations in a tight coalition are sharing contacts. Later versions of 1.x and all versions of 2.x do not support this configuration.

Now it just happens that is exactly what I'm needing but it is no longer supported. Is there any way to achieve the "shared contacts, separate content" in CiviCRM 2.1? And if so, where can I find information about that.

Well, I want more than that. I also would like that the contacts are shared over all the drupal installs.

If you plan on sharing contacts, you need to set all your drupal sites up to share the users table. To do that, you need to have them all in the same Drupal database, each with a different table prefix. Something like this in your Drupal settings.php files:

// settings.php of site1
$db_prefix = array(
  'default'   => 'site1_',
  'users'     => 'shared_',
  'sessions'  => 'shared_',
  'role'      => 'shared_',
  'authmap'   => 'shared_',
  'sequences' => 'shared_',
);

// settings.php of site2
$db_prefix = array(
  'default'   => 'site2_',
  'users'     => 'shared_',
  'sessions'  => 'shared_',
  'role'      => 'shared_',
  'authmap'   => 'shared_',
  'sequences' => 'shared_',
);