[consulting] managing many sites

[Greg Knaddison]

On 12/12/05, John Sechrest <sechrest at jas.peak.org> wrote:
> What are your strategies for keeping many different sites on many different
> hosting situations up to date and running cleanly with the smallest amount
> of time involved in that maintenance?

One strategy I have read about but never tried is of course the multi
site support which seems to be sparsely documented (unless I just
can't find it) but I found some discussion here:
http://drupal.org/node/6719

Also, I have just started to use a host which provides linux-shell
access.  This has greatly simplified my time spent doing admin
activities since I can apply new releases as patches rather than the
"backup, remove, replace" I just have to do "backup, patch" which is
much faster.

Generally, I would say that this is not terribly easy.  One thing that
I am really impressed with in the world of updates is the way that
Firefox periodically checks for updates and then downloads the
necessary files and patches itself.  The same system works for
Extensions (logically similar to modules) and for Themes (logically
similar to ...themes:)  ).

I haven't seen a web application that looked for or installed updates
to itself.  I know that some items (phpBB?) will check if they are the
latest version and warn you if that is the case, but they don't update
themselves.  This is a possible area for great improvement of Drupal,
but I think that first some infrastructure changes need to come into
place, like more consistent Module/Theme update process and increased
testing - that is my impression from the outside, mostly and those are
things which are not easy to get.

Regards,
Greg