One Portal - multiple URl's, orgs, groups

Question

Hi Forum
I am in the process of doing a proof of concept for using Web Space Server to manage a large spectrum of diverse communities, hosted within a single portal. One could describe this as a large virtual organisation.
The basic requirements are roughly the following:
1. The portal will serve multiple small organisations and interest groups, with each org or interest group having its own landing page.
2. Each landing page will have its own unique URL i.e. myspot1.com, myspot2.com etc. and the web server need to redirect each URL to its appropriate landing page.
3. The look and feel of each landing page will likely be unique in terms layout etc. thus need to be customised for each instance.
4. Web Space will be used in conjunction with Glassfishv2.1 and MySQL. The server will also run the amp stack with Apache on port 80 for other purposes.
5. This portal will serve as a core foundation shared amongst various organisations, groups etc to enable collaboration across organisational and community boundaries with least effort form a user perspective to engage wherever need to.
From playing around with both Liferay and Sun Webspace Server, it seems that these platforms can serve as a core to manage access rights, permissions, organisations, groups, etc.
My immediate needs are to better understand the following:
1. What is the best practice to route URL's to its unique landing page prior to client login?
2. From a webserver perspective, what are the options to route URL requests to the appropriate Web Space "entry points" i.e. would one set this up in Apache, Glassfish, or Web Space and how?
3. What are the options to customise each landing page to have its own unique look and feel?
Any comments or pointers to documentation will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

1. What is the best practice to route URL's to its unique landing page prior to client login?What you need is virtual hosting.
See http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/community/wiki/-/wiki/Main/High%20Availability%20Guide#section-High+Availability+Guide-TheBigPicture for details.
2. From a webserver perspective, what are the options to route URL requests to the appropriate Web Space "entry points" i.e. would one set this up in Apache, Glassfish, or Web Space and how?See my first comment. It can be handled in the web server(tomcat)
3. What are the options to customise each landing page to have its own unique look and feel?Each community can have its own look and feel.
See http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/820-7054/ghycy?a=view to know how to do this.