We contracted with a developer to build our site. We have two portals in DNN with plans for a third. Each portal is meant to service a different type of customer (one for US/Canada, one international, and another for custom products). We use Hotcakes to display products, but we sell through distributors, so we don't do any e-commerce.

With our current setup, we have two portals with different top-level domains for each, and with a third section of the site coming, we will end up with:
domain1.com
domain2.com
domain3.com
Hotcakes does allow us to have completely different set of products for each domain this way.

This does not seem optimal to me, however. I would rather have the aliases set up so we have:
domain1.com
domain1.com/international
domain1.com/eng-systems
We still want to have completely different products for each portal, though. I tried to create an alias for the international site so that it is a subdirectory (domain1.com/international) but Hotcakes only displays products for the main site this way.

I'm coming in to this project very late in the game, but it seems to me like this shouldn't be that hard to achieve. Can you provide any guidance on this?

Thanks.

Hello Ramon:

What you've described is the difference between "parent" portals (sites), and "child" sites. A parent site has its own domain or subdomain name, such as example.com or shop.example.com. A child site simply appears to be another folder on the same site, such as example.com/shop.

As you have found, parent sites are fully supported. However, child sites are not supported at this time. We have looked into this in the past, and it's not as easy as just making the decision to support this scenario. There are far too many potential issues when you consider the wide array of e-commerce use cases out there. We hope to be able to support this in the future, though.

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To chime in on this topic for future readers, the other approach that Ramon could consider is having everything in one portal/one domain and NOT have child portals. Instead, consider something like the following:

• setup pages within the website (which because of the url rewriter will appear as /folder/ in the same way a child portal does)
  
• and THEN setup individual categories to store the different products that you wish to have in these sections.
  
• you can then mark that category as HIDDEN or not visible with the main list so that the products won't show on domain one root or in the other sections of the site.
  
• you then apply a HC module to the page which shows only that specific hidden category of products