Setup many store views 20+

Question

I know this question has been asked alot for setting up one or two store groups and views but my situation is a bit different.

I need to set up 20+ store views to represent phsyical stores, URL like this: http://mywebsite.co.uk/store1

Seems pretty simple right but the 2 methods that are most well known:

1) Using sub directories, copying the index.php into them and symlinking the media etc folders - for every store this would grow out of hand pretty quickly with all the sub folders

2) set ENV variables in .htaccess or the vhost for each store which again would get unmanagable very fast

To be able to setup this many store views and keep it managable as well as easy to add more in the future, how would I go about it?

Thanks

Answer 1

it seams to me like you already have 2 options. I would go with the first one. You still have to know which store is which. So a simple folder with 2 files is not a big issue. I've done this for 30+ store views and did not have any problems maintaining it. It was even easy to enable/disable access to one of the store views, setting one on maintenance and so on.