TYPO3 handling of Domains (sysdomains) / Multiple root pages with same domain

Question

first: My technical problem is already solved, so this is not urgent, but I do not understand why my page works the way it does now. So here what happened:

I updated a site from TYPO3 4.3.X to 4.4.6. There were some problems, mainly because we changed the character-set of the database from iso-8859-1 to utf-8, but nothing serious. However: The preview of pages from the admin backend was generating wrong links (something like http://index.php?id=321). I figured out that I probably had to add a Typo3-domain to the root of the site in the List-Module, so I added www.myhost.com in List > MySite'sRootPage > Domains. Now the previewlinks were working correctly but other pages declared as "root"-pages in the page tree would not display anymore (instead, TYPO3 redirected to the start page where I added the domain) This was also the case for Newsletters-pages already sent with DirectMail and which are subpages of the DirectMail folder on root level.

I tried to insert the same domain in the different root pages but it was not possible, since typo3 changed the domain name (it does not seem to allow the entry of multiple domains with the same name. Which, in a way, makes sense.)

Now, I figured out that when I removed the domain again (- yes, I always clear the cache after doing such changes), the page links are still displayed correctly. Furthermore, Typo3 also displays the other page root sites correctly, including the newsletter pages. But I'm pretty confused what is happening here.

(Maybe it is of importance that the baseURL is also set correctly in the root page where the domain was configured.)

Since the site is pretty complex and I cannot post the whole TypoScript config here, I do not expect a detailed answer, but some hint what could have happened would be nice. Even a link on material where the internal handling of sysdomains is explained in more detail would be helpful.

Furthermore, if someone could tell me how to 'correctly' set up a site with multiple root pages handled from the same domain, I'd be curious to learn - or is this conceptually misguided and you should not try to accomplish such a setup?

Answer 1

This is intended behavior. If you have a multi domain setup, TYPO3 expects each domain to have their own root page (and only one!).

There is a quite old article from Dimitry (the author of realurl) which explains how the configuration is based on different root pages.