Hi guys,

I currently have 40+ websites that I manually manage. Each site has its own unique design and is structured slightly differently but has many of the same sections.

I am obviously looking into developing a cms to manage all the sites from a single interface, storing all information in a single database and files in a single location.

My initial idea is to code this cms and have a php function to generate the front end output for each cms elements. Then for each site have a template php page for the data to feed into.

These elements will include anything from simple text pages, photo galleries, message boards, polls, questionnaires, mixed content pages (videos/photos/text), etc.

How would you approach this?

Thanks!

Not sure what you are wanting here. But I would say build a CMS like Wordpress' back end. I have a wordpress.com blog, and a self-hosted one. Wordpress.com has a stats plugin, so I can check both blog's stats, via wp.com. I just select which blog via a drop down. The same goes for themes...

While that is a bit of a long winded answer, I hope you kind of get what I am saying...

The way i've done it in the past... this may vary depending on your server set up.

What I've done, is have a common base path for my core files.

So my CMS core may reside...

/home/cms/core

while all of my clients will reside in their own home folder

/home/client1/cms
/home/client2/cms

etc etc

From there, inside of each web folder, is a config folder.

The config will set up the basic define() for each project, including the CMS base.

When the build is ready, I invoke my build script, which moves all of the files down in directories, and then rsyncs them to the correct machine that they are hosted on.

Really, the trick is to set up your file directory, and build script, in a manner that allows you to 'overload' files.

So, example:

/core/
/admin/
/include/
/js/
/css/
main.css
..etc..

/client1/cms/
index.php
/css/
main.css


Now, in this example, the build script would copy all of the files from /core/ and put them in a temp directory.
Then, it would copy all of the files from /client1/cms/ and put them in that temp folder, overwriting the files that it conflicts with.

This allows you to over ride something per project.

Then, the trick is to just set the rsync paths and boom! you're in business managing code base for a whole lot of clients :)

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Senior Software Engineer at CityVille