I recently set up a new SDL Tridion publishing environment where a single Content Deployer was used to publish a number of different publications to different broker databases, but to the same location within a web hosting environment.  In doing so I discovered something I wasn’t aware of and though it might be worth sharing with the community.

I was looking for a structure where all sites would publish Pages and Binaries under the location C:/Websites/ so for example I would have:

• C:/Websites/SpiceGirlsCom
• C:/Websites/SpiceGirlsFR

.. with all the other items going into separate databases.

When I published the two sites, I saw content correctly going into the two databases, but on the file system I saw this sort of structure:

• C:/GlobalWebsites/Pub4/SpiceGirlsCom
• C:/GlobalWebsites/Pub20/SpiceGirlsFr

Note: SpiceGirlsCom has the publication ID ‘4‘ and SpiceGirlsFr has the publication ID ‘20‘.

The problem was in my storage configuration file (cd_storage_conf.xml) to use publication specific storage items 

<Publication Id="4" defaultStorageId="SpiceWebDB" cached="false">
  <Item typeMapping="Page" cached="true"
   storageId="defaultFile" defaultFilesystem="true"
   defaultStorage="true">
</Publication>

and..

<Publication Id="20" defaultStorageId="SpiceFRDB" cached="false">
  <Item typeMapping="Page" cached="true"
   storageId="defaultFile" defaultFilesystem="true"
   defaultStorage="true">
</Publication>

So the problem is the attribute defaultFilesytem=”true”.  When setting this attribute, the deployer will create the PubX directory as part of the storage path (in this case in storageId defaultFile).  Simply removing this attribute and republishing the content means the items are stored in the correct directory structure.