[wp-hackers] Configuring WordPress Environment / Server

[Marcus Pope]

Mike I agree with your perspective on multi-site.  We too are a an agency group that produces work for a variety of clients.  Besides multi-site not having the best isolation between sites in some regards (administration needs to be well maintained to prevent network enabling plugins & themes across the board.) it will also produce a data backend that is incongruent with a single install if they choose that design down the road.  The backend can be restructured to work but you'd need custom migration scripts to handle table renames and value updates.

We currently use a hybrid approach of using a multi-site system to manage our content only, but we then export to single installs that are fully customized per client.

Jeffrey, you could get away with just working from one install, and having build scripts manage the symlinks.  But wordpress does offer a very robust upgrade system so unless you plan on managing dozens of installs at once, you'll probably not see much benefit from reducing that process down to one install.  And in the infrequent case that an upgrade to wp core does break an existing site/feature, you'll appreciate the fine-grain control on when to do the upgrade for each client.

As for integrating AWS for media, I don't have much experience with it inside the wordpress environment.  I know there are a couple plugins for streaming media, but I'm not sure how broad the support is for other media items. Or whether they natively integrate with the wordpress editor or just offer shortcodes.  Maybe someone else can fill you in on that.

Thanks,
Marcus

-----Original Message-----
From: wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com [mailto:wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com] On Behalf Of Mike Schinkel
Sent: Sunday, October 30, 2011 6:29 PM
To: wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
Subject: Re: [wp-hackers] Configuring WordPress Environment / Server

On Oct 30, 2011, at 6:44 PM, Jeffrey Nolte wrote:
>>> Single install of WP to manage all sites (using symlinks to point to respective directories etc)
>> 
>> Are you planning to manage all your clients sites on a single install, or did I misunderstand?
> 
> that is correct, but if I am doing this wrong I am completely open to suggestions as this is in very early stages.  

Others may have different opinions but I would worry that you'd end up creating dependencies for all your clients sites by the weakest link of one of your client's site.  If you add a plugin for one client you could end up breaking all client's sites (unless you are running Multi-site, more on that below.)  

While it can simplify some things I think you'd be better off running separate installs for your separate clients, identifying what other issues you'll need to manage and then coming up which processes to manage those issues instead. Otherwise all your client's sites will be coupled and single points of failure (such a code hack) will be able to bring down everyone's site. Of course, that's my just current opinion.

-Mike
P.S. Note for fans of Multisite: In the case of one client who needs many sites, or one company offering sites to people who sign up for multi-tentant architecture Multisite is a great solution.  But I'm assuming Jeffrey's company Moxie Media Group is an agency producing fully customized sites each with different sets of plugins for different clients, and I'm thinking Multisite is probably not the best solution. Again, others may have different opinions and if so I'd welcome learning about the success of those approaches that may differ from mine.

_______________________________________________
wp-hackers mailing list
wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
http://lists.automattic.com/mailman/listinfo/wp-hackers