Nested GS installs, or one with lots of templates

[ShawnPConroy]

I've recently fallen in love with GetSimple (don't tell my fiancee) and I want to re do one of my sites with it.

Okay, great. That will be easy.

But I've decided I want to get rid of an old site I have. To do so, I will add it as a 'sub site' with specialized content and a unique theme/template and very specific content.

Once I decided that, I realized I could make a second sub site, specializing in something else.

All 3 sites are basically the same idea. (Thinking 'general' recipes vs Thai recipes vs African recipes or general handyman tips vs a site just about constructing a room and another about just car mechanics) The sub sites are just specialized content of the same kind as the main site.

My question is this: Is it better to next three different GS installs as so:

/.
/thai/.
/african/.

Or should I make one site, and just use a different template page for the sub sites. Both would work fine. And both would be easy, I think.

Are there any technical limitation or concerns I should worry about? Anything that would make one option hard that I'm not thinking about?

[shawn_a]

Not really only limitation is how big that template select box will get, and how many pages show on the pages page.

There would be no way to clearly seperate them menu wise unless you use i18n menu plugin to get multi level menu systems, and that would also help with the heirarchy in the pages page. and you migh want a special permalink structure with parents as the "sites"

[ShawnPConroy]

Thanks, I'll consider that.

What about the sitemap XML. Is it possible search engines would only look at one on the base site and maybe have delays indexing or updating the sub sites? Or are the sitemap pointed to and so the search engines would find them all?

[ShawnPConroy]

Not really only limitation is how big that template select box will get, and how many pages show on the pages page.

What do you mean by the pages page. Which page is that?

[shawn_a]

Pages.php
page listing.

[Angryboy]

You might want to consider tinkering around with I18N Special Pages. You can create content types for each disparate branch of the site (e.g. one for Thai, another for African etc...), then configure each content type with exactly the fields and templates that you need. Each section can be managed as a separate content block from within the Special Pages plugin, so it is very well arranged and relatively intuitive to use. There's also the benefit that searches using I18N Search will index the whole site for you, so you save the end-user some hassle if they are looking for content with the search engine.

You can also (regardless of whether you use Special pages or not) follow mvlcek's independent menu tutorial (if you install the base I18N plugin) to separate the menus of each branch of the site, so that each section has its own menu (whilst all being managed from the same navigational panel).