Also commerce is version 8.2

What's up Tyler? Good to hear fron you :)

We usually don't recommend having multiple CMS instances pointing to the same Commerce Manager as there are actually some dependencies between a Commerce database and the CMS site.

Instead what we recommend is to merge the two code bases to be able to create the two sites within ONE CMS instance. You can then setup user restrictions so an editor only has access to one site out of the two.

Regards,

Tobias

Hey Tobias,

Do you mean the managing mutliple websites functionality?

Could you provide a link to any information on how to get that going, assuming we want separate code bases?

Yeah, a EPiServer CMS instance can hold several sites inside of it.

/T

Saw your edit and to answer your question, no you can't have separate code bases if you want to manage multiple sites inside a single CMS instance. That's why you need to keep everything in one solution and deploy everything to one folder.

/T

Hey Toni,

How about two instances of Commerce Server pointing to one commerece database? 

For instance commerce.xyz.dev and commerce.zyx.dev pointing to commerceDB

So commerce.xyz.dev could point to the front end xyz db and likewise for zyx?

It would be nice to have separate deployments to iis with a shared catalog if possible? 

Thanks!

-Tyler

Both commerce.xyz.dev and commerce.zyx.dev needs to point to the same CMS db if they also point to the same Commerce db. You can have multiple IIS sites (and deployments) but those deployments needs to have the same code base and connecting to the same Commerce and CMS db.

edit: and this is called multi site development, which you can briefly read about in the documenation [0].

[0]: http://world.episerver.com/documentation/Items/Developers-Guide/EPiServer-CMS/8/Deployment/Setting-up-multiple-sites/

/T

Hi,

We are currently in the same situation, meaning that we have two websites, each with its own CMS, but linked to the same Commerce. I read above that Episerver does not recommend this, but can we get an insight towards why it is not recommendable? From our tests, we noticed that we can reach the Commerce Manager from each of the CMSs, even though the EpiServerDB setting in the Commerce connection string is set with the name of the first CMS (it doesn't matter which CMS we set there, both work). Also, if we change something in Commerce Manager, like adding a new EpiServer account (from the Customer Management area), it gets propagated to both CMSs (we can find it by searching the Users in the Admin area). Should we worry that at some point we can get to inconsistencies in the databases if we continue with this setup, and if so, can we have some examples? Looking forward for an answer.

Thanks!

Cristina 

I'd like to mention that although EPiServer does not recommend this approach and we will likely end up taking the recommended route, we did solve the initial technical hurdle we were running into (just in case it ends up helping anyone else).  The approach we took was doing a find/replace on our commerce application name to point to our existing instance, and although we changed all of the necessary commerce connection strings in the CMS Web.config file, we mistakenly also updated the defaultApplicationName attribute in the <application> node in ecf.app.config.  Once we changed that value back to EPiServerCommerceManager we were able to log-in and see the catalog.