Use GetSimple on same webserver for several websites

[joene]

Hi everyone

I want to use GetSimple as the CMS for clients who can create their own websites on my server. I now want to upload GetSimple only once and be able to afterwards use it for all the websites. This implies that it should have a different login user and passwort as well as different pages etc. Everything that makes out a website should be separate, whereas the main functionalities of the CMS should exist only once to avoid having to upload everything every time. Is there a possibility to do so?

Best
joene

[getsimplethemes]

At the moment (as far as I know) multi-user functionality is not yet supported (but a plugin is being developed and the next release of GetSimple will have the hooks needed to make it work). But even you get the multi-user functionality to work, I can't think of any way to manage several sites from one GetSimple installation. You'll might have to develop a plugin to get this to work... Come to think of it, that would actually make a nice little plugin, we might look into building this.

[joene]

Thanks for the answer. I guess it would be a big thing to built something as complicated like that as a plugin. Obviously the whole file structure would have to be organized differently. And usually no one would need that.
Thanks anyway

[joene]

I've looked into the file structures again and I realised that the /admin/template/js folder takes up most of the 2.7MB. I was now wondering whether it would be possible to copy everything except this folder for every client while having /admin/template/js in only one location. Is there a easy possibility to do so? If not maybe it would be easier to just have the WYSIWYG-Editor at a central place. I don't know, there might not be that many links going there?!?
Can anyone help me with this?
joene

[Vulch]

You could probably get away with making /admin in each installation a symlink to a single copy as nothing gets (or at least nothing should get) changed inside. You might be able do the same for plugins if you wanted to only offer a fixed set and ensured they don't try and modify what are now common files.

[Vulch]

Or not...

Having had a play, symlinking at that level breaks get_root_path() as it uses the __FILE__ macro which always appears to give the actual path rather than the path through the symlink. get_root_path() could probably be rewritten to use something like $_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'] instead which does take account of the apparent path, or you could symlink at a lower level at the expense of having to do updates to new versions in more places.

[joene]

Thank you Vulch for your idea. To me that seems promising. But how do you make those symlinks at all? I've never used anything like that.
joene

[joene]

Is it done by mod-rewrite? Or maybe would that be another solution?

[Vulch]

mod_rewrite happens too late really, a symlink is done at the servers file system level.

If for instance you've put your single admin in /var/www/getsimple/admin and you've put the stripped down GetSimple structure for a client in /home/client1/public_html then on the command line you'd do...

ln -s /var/www/getsimple/admin /home/client1/public_html/admin

Unix-like systems obviously, no idea if it would be possible under windows, and you need full command line access to your server which I'd expect you to have if you're reselling.

[joene]

Thank you for your answer. I don't think I have full command line access, because I'm just renting some normal webserver space.
And I don't really see why mod_rewrite should not work. I just tried it myself and it seems to work perfectly. This is what I did:
I placed one complete copy of GetSimple in /getsimple/.
Then I placed another copy of GetSimple without any content of the js-directory in /getsimple2/.
I then created a .htaccess-file in /getsimple2/admin/template/js/ and filled this file with

Code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ ../../../../getsimple/admin/template/js/$1

Then I installed both copies of the CMS and both WYSIWYG-Editors work just fine, and as far as I see this, among other things, is saved in the js-folder which now loads everything out of /getsimple/admin/template/js/.
I'm now wondering why you said that mod_rewrite happens too late. As far as I see it works great. Are there any disadvantages by having it this way?
Thanks again
joene

[Vulch]

For the Javascript files and CSS mod_rewrite is probably going to be OK, I was still thinking of ways to share the PHP files as well which has to be done before mod_rewrite gets a look in.