Multiple Sites with seperate users

Ruby Apps Radiant CMS
1

I’ve decided to develop my next CMS type site in Radiant, and hopefully
make my CMS of choice, mainly because its simple, flexible and in Ruby.

What I would really like to do is setup a large machine running Radiant
for simple brochure type sites for many clients. Each client would get
their own radiant login for their site, and each site would have its own
domain, layouts, snippets etc without one client affecting the other.

In one case so far, I would like to run multiple sites for a single
user, sharing content.

I was hoping to run this with (1st choice) JRuby or (2nd choice)
Passenger for efficiency and maintainability.

I should then have minimal maintenance, setup and hosting costs per site
and be able to make some cash ;^).

I’m most concerned about Radiant’s ability to keep these clients
seperate
a) assuming they are non-technical, I don’t want them confused by seeing
each others content
b) where some malicious hacker gets a login to Radiant.

Any thoughts ? Is this possible now ? Anyone else wanting to achieve
this ?

2

There is an extension for the first part, running sites separately:

http://ext.radiantcms.org/extensions/3-multi-site

Not sure on its compatibility with radiant 0.7 nor running two separate
sites while sharing content.

Jeff

3

Jeffrey J. wrote:

There is an extension for the first part, running sites separately:

http://ext.radiantcms.org/extensions/3-multi-site

Not sure on its compatibility with radiant 0.7 nor running two separate
sites while sharing content.

Thanks for that. Does anyone know how seperate the sites are from each
other ?

Or is it mainly useful for a single user running multiple sites ?

Also, if I run each client as a seperate install of Radiant, would any
Ruby interpreter manage memory eficiently by only keeping one copy of
Rails and Radiant in memory ?

And how hard would it be for Radiant to support multiple independant
sites from a single install ?

4

On 14-Feb-09, at 5:30 PM, Bartee L. wrote:

Thanks for that. Does anyone know how seperate the sites are from
And how hard would it be for Radiant to support multiple independant
sites from a single install ?

I am trying to do the same thing. I installed multi_site. It does
provide for multiple sites, but from what I can determine does not
provide user scope. That is each user is assigned to a site and the
user can ONLY see their pages/snippets/layouts. So without that it
really does not do me any good to have all of my clients using one
radiant code base.

I’m in a similar situation and have found some code that gives the
appearance of user scope for many of the more common extensions. The
standard approach seems to be to hide the content from other users
rather than deny them access which is not ideal but works well enough
for my users.

I’d love to see a little more support for multi-site deployments. Ruby
deployments are still quite resource intensive and running multiple
sites on a single codebase is the best way to minimize resource usage
right now.

Here are the two I have bookmarked though I also found similar
projects for other extensions at github.
http://github.com/netzpirat/radiant-search-multi-site-extension/tree/master
http://github.com/netzpirat/radiant-paperclipped-multisite-extension/tree/master

Troy

5

Mr Magpie wrote:

Jeffrey J. wrote:

There is an extension for the first part, running sites separately:

http://ext.radiantcms.org/extensions/3-multi-site

Not sure on its compatibility with radiant 0.7 nor running two separate
sites while sharing content.

Thanks for that. Does anyone know how seperate the sites are from each
other ?

Or is it mainly useful for a single user running multiple sites ?

Also, if I run each client as a seperate install of Radiant, would any
Ruby interpreter manage memory eficiently by only keeping one copy of
Rails and Radiant in memory ?

And how hard would it be for Radiant to support multiple independant
sites from a single install ?

I am trying to do the same thing. I installed multi_site. It does
provide for multiple sites, but from what I can determine does not
provide user scope. That is each user is assigned to a site and the
user can ONLY see their pages/snippets/layouts. So without that it
really does not do me any good to have all of my clients using one
radiant code base.

6

Thanks for all the responses. Those existing extensions at least give me
something to work with for when I get onto this. Real multisite support
might distinguish Radiant from the many other CMS out there, but I don’t
know the others enough to say really.

7

Nick Plate has done user scoping for the multi_site extension:

but unfortunately he did it just before josh french converted the
official tests to specs. So you have either the official multi_site
with specs and no user scoping, or the user scoped multi_site with no
specs. I planned to convert Nicks enhanced version with tests to
specs, but I didn’t found any free time until now.

Michael

8

Could you keep us posted on this forum.

I really would like to have this. I have installed 0.7.0

I am going to hold off using this until I can get multi-sites and users.

thanks

Hey, I wouldn’t want anyone to be holding their breath for me to do
this.
I haven’t even looked at the Radiant code base, and I’m quite pushed to
do anything non-essential at present. I could get by with one Radiant
install per customer for some time. I’ve got hungry mouths to feed.
Sorry if I gave the wrong impression.

9

Mr Magpie wrote:

Could you keep us posted on this forum.

I really would like to have this. I have installed 0.7.0

I am going to hold off using this until I can get multi-sites and users.

thanks

Hey, I wouldn’t want anyone to be holding their breath for me to do
this.
I haven’t even looked at the Radiant code base, and I’m quite pushed to
do anything non-essential at present. I could get by with one Radiant
install per customer for some time. I’ve got hungry mouths to feed.
Sorry if I gave the wrong impression.

Magpie,

No wrong impressions… just hope.

I absolutely understand the “shoes for Baby” problem.

So I too will be using individual installs.

Thanks for you input and good luck on feeding the kiddies…

…bartee…

10

Michael Kessler wrote:

Nick Plate has done user scoping for the multi_site extension:
add scoped multi-site updates as described at http://blog.zerosum.org… · zapnap/radiant-multi-site-extension@46a035d · GitHub
but unfortunately he did it just before josh french converted the
official tests to specs. So you have either the official multi_site
with specs and no user scoping, or the user scoped multi_site with no
specs. I planned to convert Nicks enhanced version with tests to
specs, but I didn’t found any free time until now.

Michael

Could you keep us posted on this forum.

I really would like to have this. I have installed 0.7.0

I am going to hold off using this until I can get multi-sites and users.

thanks

11

Hey guys. I wrote a vhost extension back in October that does what
you’re looking for… separate sites, separate admin interfaces, one
install. I was holding it back because it runs something proprietary
but finally my conscience wouldn’t let me hold it back any more.

It was last updated in October of 2008, so it won’t work with 0.7.0.
I won’t have time to update it soon, but please, fork away!

  • Usernames and passwords are shared between sites (a good thing),
    but you choose which users have access to which sites.
  • You log in to example.com’s admin interface by going to example.com/
    admin and logging in. example2.com’s admin is at Log In ‹ Example — WordPress
    There is no interface to move between sites, and that’s a good thing!
  • Pages, layouts, and snippets are separate, not shared.
  • You can have one catch-all (*) site.

TODO:

  • do more of a regular expression match (like multi_site?) so that
    the hostname doesn’t have to match exactly.
  • a better way than scoping? many other extensions are not compatible

Jason

12

Jason G. wrote:

Hey guys. I wrote a vhost extension back in October that does what
you’re looking for… separate sites, separate admin interfaces, one
install. I was holding it back because it runs something proprietary
but finally my conscience wouldn’t let me hold it back any more.

GitHub - jgarber/radiant-vhost-extension: Like the multi_site extension but each domain appears to operate independently with its own scoped pages, snippets, and layouts. Host multiple, independent web sites. Right now only works with Radiant 0.6.9

It was last updated in October of 2008, so it won’t work with 0.7.0.
I won’t have time to update it soon, but please, fork away!

  • Usernames and passwords are shared between sites (a good thing),
    but you choose which users have access to which sites.
  • You log in to example.com’s admin interface by going to example.com/
    admin and logging in. example2.com’s admin is at Log In ‹ Example — WordPress
    There is no interface to move between sites, and that’s a good thing!
  • Pages, layouts, and snippets are separate, not shared.
  • You can have one catch-all (*) site.

Sounds great !

Some questions :

  • can you have seperate databases or table prefixes ?
  • is it compatible with the sns and sns_file_system extensions ?
    Basically I would like to be able to backup and restore each site
    seperately.
  • does the “catch all” site share its contents with all others ie is
    that the point of it ?
  • I’m guessing this extension by its nature would be sensitive to future
    changes in the Radiant code, and so ideally should become part of
    Radiant. Do you agree ?

Cheers

magpie