[support] Multiple site update and maintenance D6

[Nik Derewianka]

Hi,

After being spoilt by magento with it's './pear update all' mechanism  
to upgrade an entire site and its modules, I am trying to find a way  
to manage the updating of multiple drupal installs in as painless a  
manner as possible.

My server is running plesk and each client will have their own install  
of Drupal.  The suggestions of domain aliases for each site as per http://drupal.org/node/201322 
  is not applicable as it loses all the benefits of plesk (bandwidth  
monitoring, seperate client accounts, etc).

Trying to script it all with something like drush would probably be  
great, but so far i have been unable to get the drush_extras (in  
particular pm) to work at all - i keep getting command not found even  
though i have the commands in a command folder in the drush doler as  
well as having it in a .drush folder in my home folder.  I think this  
may be more due to the fact that drush for D6 is downloadable only as  
a HEAD snapshot rather than an actual release that has been tested ???

Another alternative is to look at symlinking the httpdocs folder for  
each account to a single drupal install and use drupal in a multi-site  
setup.  There are still some drawbacks to this with regards to  
permissions and any non drupal files that a client may wish to put in  
their account (at say the root level).

Right now, the only clear method seems to be maintaining a bunch of  
shell scripts that have to be tweaked every second day to keep up with  
the releases for modules.  Even having a http://drupal.org/project/ 
<name>/latest url scheme would greatly improve this approach.  But  
overall this is far from ideal.

But, I guess at the end of the day, how are people managing 10's/100's  
of drupal sites and keeping them regularly updated and maintained when  
the drupal multi-site functionality does not suit them ???

Thanks,
Nik