[wp-hackers] Configuring WordPress Environment / Server

[Jeffrey Nolte]

Thanks Mike and Marcus for your insight and time.

> 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.
I did not really see the value in using Multi-Site for our purposes and it sounds like you have shed some more light on why.

> 
> 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.
My main reasoning for using one install was to save time for upgrading as we may be managing dozens of sites.  In the past year I would say we developed 20+ WP sites, after a while managing those types of upgrades could turn out to be painful.  My main idea for this came from viewing the way Debian's Maverick WordPress package is configured, essentially you create a new wp-config file for each domain and when updating you update your core files in one location.  This sounds attractive to me as we will be able to update all the sites we manage at once instead of 1 by 1.  Our plan is to have fail safe tools (error logs, link checking, etc) in place in the event the site does have an error or goes down so we can remedy the issue immediately.
> 
> 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.
It seems AWS will mainly serve as a CDN for all of the sites we build.  This plugin seems like it does what we will need, I was mainly seeing if anyone had thoughts on this.

I am just mainly trying to develop a system that is secure, fast and easy to maintain.

Does anyone have an environment like this setup that can shed more light on this?

Thanks again,

Jeff