Run multiple domains with different traders, designs, and rotation stats on a single gallery database. Sites can even run on different servers.
The setup: One master site collects galleries; slave sites use the master's database. Changes on the master automatically propagate to all slaves.
In practice: Install the script on all domains. Site 1 is the master with the full gallery database. Sites 2 and 3 are slaves using the master's database. On each slave, go to Rotation - Settings, specify the master's MySQL database, and click “Link to This DB”.
Benefits:
Limitations:
Shared (master + slaves):
Separate per slave:
By default, slaves use master descriptions. You can enable “Separate Desc” on a slave to add custom descriptions there instead, saving database space.
Multiple niches from one master:
If your master is multi-niche, quickly create niche sites from it:
How: Go to Rotation - Settings - Linked DB, select external database, and specify the master's credentials.
If you store thumbnails locally on the master (default: scj/thumbs), tell the slave where to find them. On the slave, go to Rotation - Settings and set Alt Hosts to the master domain (just the domain, e.g., master.com).
Here's why: on the master, thumbnails are at /scj/thumbs/. When a gallery is grabbed, thumb 123 is saved as scj/thumbs/123.jpg. On the slave, specify Alt Hosts = master.com, so URLs become http://master.com/scj/thumbs/123.jpg.
Note: Anti-hotlinking is usually enabled (correctly). Ensure the master allows hotlinking from the slave. Contact your admin if needed.
To use slave domain instead of master domain (http://slave.com/scj/thumbs/123.jpg vs. http://master.com/scj/thumbs/123.jpg):
Same server:
Create a symlink: /home/slave.com/scj/thumbs → /home/master.com/scj/thumbs. Don't set Alt Hosts. URLs stay as /scj/thumbs/123.jpg and load normally.
Different servers:
Master and slave can be on different servers. Two notes:
Slaves have their own statistics for thumbs, but when a slave is added the statistics are copied from the master. If you want to start rotation on the slave from scratch - you can reset all statistics in rotation - special.
To create a site identical to the master except for design: on the master, set Rotation - Settings - Own thumb stats = “Use master” and Own descriptions = “Use master”. This creates a complete copy with different templates, letting you run hundreds of trading sites on one server.
When master and slave trade with each other and use category thumbnails, consider Rotation - CMS - Tube Settings option “Category thumbs: Thumb number”. For the slave, set it to 2-3 instead of 1 so sites initially look different. Later, when slave CTR diverges from master, change it back to 1.
By default, slaves link to galleries on themselves. Master and slave can use different templates to display the same gallery differently:
http://master/gallery/cool/index.html (master's design) http://slave/gallery/cool/index.html (slave's design)
Sometimes you want slave links to point to the master (to boost master PR). Simply changing the template link to http://master/gallery/GALLERY_SLUG/index.html won't work—it redirects without counting clicks.
Instead, route traffic through the slave's click counter:
1. Change the template link from:
/gallery/GALLERY_SLUG/index.html?<!--THUMB_LINK--> to: /scj/cgi/out.php?url=http://master/gallery/GALLERY_SLUG/index.html&link=images/<!--THUMB_LINK-->
2. Or change the rewrite rule from:
RewriteRule ^gallery/([^/]+)/index.html$ /scj/cgi/out.php?link=images/%{QUERY_STRING}&url=content&slug=$1 [L]
to:
RewriteRule ^gallery/([^/]+)/index.html$ /scj/cgi/out.php?link=images/%{QUERY_STRING}&url=http://master/gallery/$1/index.html [L]