[consulting] managing many sites

[Khalid B]

On 12/12/05, Greg Knaddison <greg.knaddison at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

I have started with Drupal in a multi site configuration, which I ran
on 3 sites for more than 1.5 years. This was one of the attractive
points about Drupal when I initially selected it over competitors.

Over  time, I have found that multi site is not a panacea. If you
break something in one crucial file, ALL your sites are broken. When
you have to upgrade to new releases of Drupal, you have to do it
simultaneously for all the sites.

So, I moved to each site running off of its own Drupal installation,
and I can update each on its own schedule.

Still, 3 sites is not that much. I see where 12 sites is a burden.

> 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.

I am also a command line guy, and find that it is much more
productive. However this is a mindset that I do not expect many to
share.

Another strategy that some on this list use is checkout Drupal
directly via CVS to the target machine, and upgrade by doing a "cvs
update".

I  have not used this scheme, but someone who does can tell us more about it.