Using Virtual Domains: Two menus with same content and different links

Question

I'm a novice user of the Virtual Domains plugin (http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/extension/core-enhancements/multiple-sites/virtual-domains). I have a big site (www.bigsite.local) with a main menu. I need that one of the options from the menu redirect to another domain (other.bigsite.local), while the other options go to the same domain.

As far as I understand, I must create two menus:

1. The www.bigsite.local main menu, with normal options (single article, blog category, etc), and one option with a link redirecting to other.bigsite.local
2. The other.bigsite.local main menu, with the same options as the oher menu, but instead of normal links generated by joomla (single article, blog category, etc), hard coded links to the original pages from www.bigsite.local

Is this correct? Because if it's correct, the maintenance of the second menu can be difficult, updating the hardcoded links to the content generated by Joomla... And if it isn't correct, what is the correct way to do this job?

Answer 1

I went through a similar process with separate menus for each website but found this was hard to manage and did not work well for several reasons.

Virtual Domains now has a menu filtering option where you can have one main menu and choose which menu options are associated with each website.

Virtual Domains also enables you to specify a home menu item for each website.

In practice, this seems to work much better and is easier to manage.

Menu filtering works with multiple menus, if needed. I find it useful to prefix menu names with a code for each website to help remind me which menus apply to each website. (see below).