[development] Drupal Multi-Site Management

[Kieran Lal]

On Jul 19, 2006, at 3:39 PM, Tim Jones wrote:

> Hi Devlist,
>
> I'm working with Green Media Toolshed to set up a system for  
> managing multiple instances of Drupal on the same server and  
> sharing information between them.
>
> We're very keen on sharing this and collaborating on it with  
> anybody who's interested in something similar. I'm trying to figure  
> out which of these functionalities are too specific to our use-case  
> to be useful to others, and which the community would benefit from  
> developing a standardized and well-supported way of doing.
>
> So, I've included a list of our target functionality below. Send  
> feedback! Especially if you're interested in collaborating on this,  
> or are working on something similar, or if you have ideas about how  
> to implement it in a way that will be in-line with Drupal Core's  
> future direction, or if you think it's crazy and can't be done. If  
> there is enough interest, we'll set up a Drupal Group to coordinate.

I outlined a summer of code project to do this and we had several  
submissions. I haven't seen any progress updates on the developer  
list about the  SOC projects.  You should check how that is working.

Cheers,
Kieran

>
> Cheers,
> =Tones=
> greenmediatoolshed.org
> tjones.cc
>
>
> *****
> Green Media Toolshed
> Multi-Site Hosting Requirements Document, v0.3
> Tim Jones - tim at tjones.cc - 19 July, 2006
>
> 1. Site management
>     - Provide GMT admins with a "dashboard" list of all current GMT  
> websites,
>       including partner information.
>
>     - Automatically deploy new Drupal sites based on site-template  
> databases,
>       via web interface.
>
>     - Track database, client and domain data for all sites.
>
>     - Allow and manage multiple domains/subdomains for each site.
>
>     - Manage cron.php runs across all sites.
>
>     - Run database queries across all sites simultaneously.
>
>     - Manage and synch site filesystems.
>       (I think this is only relevant if the setup it not using
>        the Drupal "/sites/foo" convention.)
>
>
> 2. User / Client management
>     - Users and clients have a many-to-one relationship.
>       Clients and sites have a many-to-one relationship.
>
>     - A user may log in to any site owned by that user's client.
>
>     - Users have roles per-client that affect their permissions on
>       client sub-sites.
>
>     - Standard ("Authenticated") users are not shared between sites.
>       (e.g. for Forums, Blog Comments, etc.)
>
>     - Clearly the specifics of this need to be thought through more
>
>
> 3. API
>     - Modules on a given site should be able to access contextual
>       multihost information. For instance,
>         - What client is this site for?
>         - What other sites for this client are hosted on this system?
>         - Any other relevant client/group data
>
>
> 4. For the Future:
>    ("Wishlist")
>     - Taxonomy sharing
>     - Better mailing lists (possibly og2list?)
>     - Multisite statistics aggregation
>     - Other stuff?
>
>
>
>