multistore advice needed

[SylvainG]

Hello all,

I'm trying to setup a multistore.

I'd like to have a main store (the father of all the stores) referencing all the sub stores. Menus, modules... will all be the same. In this case multi-store is almost only a backend feature : each vendor only manage his products. For the frontend all I need is informations about the vendor on the product page and the ability to search on all the products (whatever the store is).

 

So I tried the following:

• Main store is set on the default "home" category. It will never have it's own products,
• Each sub store has a specific category (child of the default "home" category)  with all its products.

 

My questions :

• Is it the right way to proceed?
• On the main store, url rewriting doesn't seem to fit my needs: categories under "home" (ie the sub shops categories) are always empty because they belong to a sub shop.
• On the main store, search is not made on all stores. 

 

Hope I'm clear,

 

Sylvain