Looking for feedback and experienced advice regarding setting up over 20 sites under one installation.
I am going to be creating over 20 sites with seperate domains for one umbrella org. It is my conviction, this will become a nightmare to maintain. I've read extensively and there are mixed feelings on the subject. Many mention several sites, which seems managable, but 20+?
The client is currently running on Sitecore, which apparently
manages mulitple sites more elegantly that Umbraco, to my understanding.
The client wants a change, and expects the same form of user structure/architecture.
My major concerns are, one, users will potentially find it overwhelming to edit their respective content. Two, that I as a developer will lose the plot quickly with all this content in Umbraco as it is designed (macros, templates, xslt files). Lastly, what about stability? Any errors arising within the system, DB etc. could potentially result in downtime for all sites, to my mind.
Like Lee says, I'd also seperate the sites if they are to different.
"My major concerns are, one, users will potentially find it overwhelming to edit their respective content" - This should not be a showstopper for you. You can restrict the different users to what they have access to in the content tree. This means that user1 and user2 can easily work in the same Umbraco installation, but they might not see the same nodes in the content tree.
If you're going to go down this route then make sure you plan it from the start. Some ideas:
- Put consistent site abbreviations before every macro, tempalte, doc type that identifies the site it will be used for
- structure your CSS something like /css/site1/sitename.css & /css/site1/images/
- think carefully before considering whether to reuse macros, master doc types between sites
- organising the templates is quite easy in Umbraco if you have 1 master page/template per site
you're going to run into permissions problems if a user is allowed access to more than 1 site but not access to all. I.e. you will need to grant access to the route "Content" node which will let them see all sites. Also it will be very tricky (impossible?) if there are developers only allowed access to some sites.
Is there a way of breaking the 20 sites into groups so you could have 4 installations of 5 sites e.g. by department or editors. This might make it more manageable.
I also encountered an issue in previous versions of Umbraco where NiceURL would not resolve correctly below level 2 for sites other than the first site. I.e. site2/contact would correctly become http://www.site2.com/contact.aspx but site2/news/article1 would become http://www.site1.com/news/acticle1.aspx. I'm not sure if this issue still exists in the current version - if it does it would make it unworkable at 20+ sites.
It'd be great to see more support for this built into future versions of Umbraco :)
Thanks for the quick and solid feedback from all so far. I've thought out many of the issues you all mention. Structuring with name prefixes is not a problem. One could eaisly decide from the get-go to assign seperate templates, doctypes, macros, user controls, xslt docs to each site. Naming conventions such as ws1Master, ws2Master is also good practice, I would think. Umbraco provides the ability to put stylesheets, images and other assets in seperate directories, so that is not my major concern. However, I will easily run into 100+ doctypes, same for templates, in one "directory", as it is not possible to seperate these in the content tree. Maybe it is a reflection of my own sense of direction that this issue concerms me. Some are better at keeping track of so much content than others.
@Paul Blair: I considered this option as well, structuring in
blocks i.e. 5 sites per installation. Editors and users will
most likely only concern themselves with one site. The major advantage to a
centralized login for all 25 sites is from the vantage of the developer
(me) and a central administrator at HQ. 5 logins/installations certainly beats 25. Something to consider.
After rethinking all the issues, based on the feedback above, my major concern at this point is stability. I've never created more than one site per installation, Should I get deeply into this project and begin experiencing conflicts, is their any way to reconfigure and seperate content into unique installations, or will I need to start from scratch with new installations and rebuild all sites? I would imagine this is the case. Sounds like a dream ;~)
If you decided to split the sites into seperate installations at a later stage you should be able to package everything in a site (except for media items) and import it into a fresh install
@Paul: Nice to hear. No experience with packaging yet, but good to hear it is a possibility. I've also been trying to get a read on some of the add-ons, like Courier. Does this make packaging and transfering less complicated, or is it largely designed to assist with staging and publihing? In layman's terms, what is the major advantage of a Courier add-on? I've read the documentation on Umbraco's site, but it sounds a bit abstract when my knowledge of the environment is still relatively limited.
my current mindset is never to combine websites in a single Umbraco install unless you have a very good reason to do so. There are many things that you'll come across (different 404 errors for different sites, contentmanagers, channels & permissions, deployments can bring down all sites instead of just one, dictionary items can't be structures, xslt can't easily be structured in folders, ...)
also, there are no benefits to this at all, unless you are reusing content & templates/doctypes.
@Rik Helsen: Hey Rik. Yeah, that is my fear. I am green in this area, but my intuition tells me if a problem arises, tracking and debugging with 25 sites would be a nightmare - if it can be resolved at all.
The ONE benifit we seek is a central login, opposed to 25 installations, 25 logins. But I am beginning to sense the benifit is not worth the risk.
I believe all sites will run from the same web server. If we go with seperate installations, is it best to use the same db for all sites?
Naah Dwayne. If you descide to go for seperate installations, you also have to use seperate databases for the each of the installations. You can't have 25 installations of umbraco all running on the same database. This simply won't work.
The advantages to combining installs that I can think of are:
- if you want to upgrade Umbraco you don't have to do it once (more testing will be required though...)
- only 1 database required, good if you're on a shared hosting plan
- 1 login
- if you have low usage sites the website will get suspended in IIS if it is not used for a period of time (20 minutes depending on settings). Having lots of low usage sites on 1 install can help with this as they should be getting pinged more often
So it can be done and there are some advantages but I tend to agree with Rik that the disadvantages usually outway the advantages
You should also think about performance, in cambined install all content will be in memory even if only 1 site will be active, and it can be problem on your hosting plan. Also all content in one database can cause some that db will be slower then if you have single install.
And if you plan using members section, you member will be registred in all sites...
For members in separate install you can try use openid from projects section
@Kim: Yeah, I thought that might be the case. I'm not even certain what the performance advantages would be when running a single db on multi sites - if that were possible. Just checking ;~)
@Paul Blair: "- if you have low usage sites the website will get suspended in IIS if
it is not used for a period of time (20 minutes depending on settings)" I've read elsewhere this could be an issue. Sounds very strange to me. How many sites actually maintain constant traffic 24/7, unless they are mega international sites? What's the work around to prevent this? What happens if/when a site is suspended. Does this mean pages can not be accessed?
@Petr Snobelt: "For members in separate install you can try use openid from projects section." Not sure what you refer to. Would that mean an administrator for all sites could be created once and have access to all sites with the same ID/password?
re low usage sites: The effect of this happening is that the next time the application is accessed it will have a slower than usual load time. It does not mean pages will not be accessable. A work around is to subscribe to a ping service to keep the site active. It is also configurable in IIS7 but it is unlikely you will have access to this setting in a shared hosting environment.
For performance, I don't think it will be too much of an issue. I don't see it as being any different to 1 one large site so it just depends on the server specs. Also wouldn't one application + 1 DB take up a lot less resources than 20+ apps?
I have a multisite running on one database, on a VPS, dual core 2.5ghz processors and 3gb of memory installed.
There are 31 sites and especially the first few days were very busy with 10,000 visitors a day and still there are thousands of visitors half a year later. This has caused absolutely no speed or memory problems for use, the site has been performing very very well. Better than expected even, as I haven't even turned caching on at all.
As others have said before, if your sites are rather similar, it can definately be recommended to run them all in one instance.
Just make sure your total page load time stays rather low (we try to keep it under a second). It's easy to find out which parts of a page take a long time to load (add ?umbDebugShowTrace=true to your querystring) and it is not difficult to optimize peformance. For example, we did a bit of optimization by not using "//" in XSLT as this will select all of the 60,000+ nodes. Also, we created a media caching package, but that was only necessary for Umbraco versions lower than 4.5. We had to do little other optimization though.
Started the project yesterday and met our server/system admininistrator today for the first time, We have
been hashing ideas, largely based on my knowledge of Umbaco (thanks to
ALL so far for the great tips and feed) and his experience running the servers at the firm.
@Paul Blair: Our sites run on our own server, so I assume we can tweak IIS. The sys admin tells me we are running Win Server 2008/SQL Express. Effeciency is one thing of which I am uncertain, which is a major reason for this post. I would much prefer 1 install. The question I raised when creating this post is: what are the potential threats/down-sides. I'm still a bit on the fence, but leaning toward 1 install after reading several threads, including Sebastiaans recent post.
@Rik Helsen: If I knew how to "activate the ActiveDirectory authentication in our starting image", I suppose that might be an option ;~) I'm sort of following you, Rik - but at a great distance. The server admin should be able to help me out, I imagine, if we go with multiple installs.
@Sebastiaan Janssen: Firstly, 60,000+ nodes sounds a bit insane to me. Kudos if that is managable for you. Perhaps I am organizationally challenged, but I fear becoming overwhelmed by the navigational complexity that could arise with multiple sites in Umbraco. Currently, the sites run on Sitecore, which has the advantage of providing content storage that resembles a prototypical explorer, you know, with "folders", multiple organizational levels and the like. However, our sites are not nearly nearly as large as yours, I am assuming. Your feedback is definitely appreciated and quite helpful. Food for thought.
Thanks again for all for the great responses thus far. You're all champs :-) If I could share some karma, I would. But I can only send you good vibes and much thanks at this point, Your help is much appreciatedand / well received.
Dwayne, it's not that bad actually, we just had a good hard look at the way in which we need to organize the content and in this case we just ended up putting then in folders by alphabet (first letter) because that made sense for our scenario. Organization always seems to be key to a succesful CMS implementation.
As soon as you have all your different sites each under a single node, everything will surely fall into place quite easily. Also, a quick tip: it is very convenient to store site-wide settings in the top node for that site, easily accessible through XSLT by referring to the ancestor-or-self node at level 1.
Anyway, if you have future questions, we're all here to help, don't hesitate to ask.
Good to hear, Sebastiaan. When you say "it is very convenient to store site-wide settings in the top node for that site", which node are you refering to? The first Document inside the site node?
Dwayne: this is how my content tree looks, so on each of the "site folders" I have settings, like google analytics account, google maps api key, and so on:
MANY multiple sites, one installation
Hi all,
Looking for feedback and experienced advice regarding setting up over 20 sites under one installation.
I am going to be creating over 20 sites with seperate domains for one umbrella org. It is my conviction, this will become a nightmare to maintain. I've read extensively and there are mixed feelings on the subject. Many mention several sites, which seems managable, but 20+?
The client is currently running on Sitecore, which apparently manages mulitple sites more elegantly that Umbraco, to my understanding. The client wants a change, and expects the same form of user structure/architecture.
My major concerns are, one, users will potentially find it overwhelming to edit their respective content. Two, that I as a developer will lose the plot quickly with all this content in Umbraco as it is designed (macros, templates, xslt files). Lastly, what about stability? Any errors arising within the system, DB etc. could potentially result in downtime for all sites, to my mind.
Hi Dwayne,
My first question would be; How similar are the websites? In terms of re-using templates, doc-types, etc?
If each website is completely different/bespoke, then I'd advise you to separate them out into their own Umbraco install.
If its a case where each site is using the same templates (HTML, could have different CSS), same doc-types, then I'd say go for it!
You are correct what you say about downtime - any issues will affect all the websites. That's a decision you need to make - flexibility vs resilience.
Cheers, Lee.
Hi Dwayne
Like Lee says, I'd also seperate the sites if they are to different.
"My major concerns are, one, users will potentially find it overwhelming to edit their respective content" - This should not be a showstopper for you. You can restrict the different users to what they have access to in the content tree. This means that user1 and user2 can easily work in the same Umbraco installation, but they might not see the same nodes in the content tree.
/Kim A
If you're going to go down this route then make sure you plan it from the start. Some ideas:
- Put consistent site abbreviations before every macro, tempalte, doc type that identifies the site it will be used for
- structure your CSS something like /css/site1/sitename.css & /css/site1/images/
- think carefully before considering whether to reuse macros, master doc types between sites
- organising the templates is quite easy in Umbraco if you have 1 master page/template per site
you're going to run into permissions problems if a user is allowed access to more than 1 site but not access to all. I.e. you will need to grant access to the route "Content" node which will let them see all sites. Also it will be very tricky (impossible?) if there are developers only allowed access to some sites.
Is there a way of breaking the 20 sites into groups so you could have 4 installations of 5 sites e.g. by department or editors. This might make it more manageable.
I also encountered an issue in previous versions of Umbraco where NiceURL would not resolve correctly below level 2 for sites other than the first site. I.e. site2/contact would correctly become http://www.site2.com/contact.aspx but site2/news/article1 would become http://www.site1.com/news/acticle1.aspx. I'm not sure if this issue still exists in the current version - if it does it would make it unworkable at 20+ sites.
It'd be great to see more support for this built into future versions of Umbraco :)
Cheers
Paul
Hey guys,
Thanks for the quick and solid feedback from all so far. I've thought out many of the issues you all mention. Structuring with name prefixes is not a problem. One could eaisly decide from the get-go to assign seperate templates, doctypes, macros, user controls, xslt docs to each site. Naming conventions such as ws1Master, ws2Master is also good practice, I would think. Umbraco provides the ability to put stylesheets, images and other assets in seperate directories, so that is not my major concern. However, I will easily run into 100+ doctypes, same for templates, in one "directory", as it is not possible to seperate these in the content tree. Maybe it is a reflection of my own sense of direction that this issue concerms me. Some are better at keeping track of so much content than others.
@Paul Blair: I considered this option as well, structuring in blocks i.e. 5 sites per installation. Editors and users will most likely only concern themselves with one site. The major advantage to a centralized login for all 25 sites is from the vantage of the developer (me) and a central administrator at HQ. 5 logins/installations certainly beats 25. Something to consider.
After rethinking all the issues, based on the feedback above, my major concern at this point is stability. I've never created more than one site per installation, Should I get deeply into this project and begin experiencing conflicts, is their any way to reconfigure and seperate content into unique installations, or will I need to start from scratch with new installations and rebuild all sites? I would imagine this is the case. Sounds like a dream ;~)
If you decided to split the sites into seperate installations at a later stage you should be able to package everything in a site (except for media items) and import it into a fresh install
@Paul: Nice to hear. No experience with packaging yet, but good to hear it is a possibility. I've also been trying to get a read on some of the add-ons, like Courier. Does this make packaging and transfering less complicated, or is it largely designed to assist with staging and publihing? In layman's terms, what is the major advantage of a Courier add-on? I've read the documentation on Umbraco's site, but it sounds a bit abstract when my knowledge of the environment is still relatively limited.
my current mindset is never to combine websites in a single Umbraco install unless you have a very good reason to do so. There are many things that you'll come across (different 404 errors for different sites, contentmanagers, channels & permissions, deployments can bring down all sites instead of just one, dictionary items can't be structures, xslt can't easily be structured in folders, ...)
also, there are no benefits to this at all, unless you are reusing content & templates/doctypes.
@Rik Helsen: Hey Rik. Yeah, that is my fear. I am green in this area, but my intuition tells me if a problem arises, tracking and debugging with 25 sites would be a nightmare - if it can be resolved at all.
The ONE benifit we seek is a central login, opposed to 25 installations, 25 logins. But I am beginning to sense the benifit is not worth the risk.
I believe all sites will run from the same web server. If we go with seperate installations, is it best to use the same db for all sites?
Naah Dwayne. If you descide to go for seperate installations, you also have to use seperate databases for the each of the installations. You can't have 25 installations of umbraco all running on the same database. This simply won't work.
/Kim A
The advantages to combining installs that I can think of are:
- if you want to upgrade Umbraco you don't have to do it once (more testing will be required though...)
- only 1 database required, good if you're on a shared hosting plan
- 1 login
- if you have low usage sites the website will get suspended in IIS if it is not used for a period of time (20 minutes depending on settings). Having lots of low usage sites on 1 install can help with this as they should be getting pinged more often
So it can be done and there are some advantages but I tend to agree with Rik that the disadvantages usually outway the advantages
You should also think about performance, in cambined install all content will be in memory even if only 1 site will be active, and it can be problem on your hosting plan. Also all content in one database can cause some that db will be slower then if you have single install.
And if you plan using members section, you member will be registred in all sites...
For members in separate install you can try use openid from projects section
Petr
@Kim: Yeah, I thought that might be the case. I'm not even certain what the performance advantages would be when running a single db on multi sites - if that were possible. Just checking ;~)
@Paul Blair: "- if you have low usage sites the website will get suspended in IIS if it is not used for a period of time (20 minutes depending on settings)" I've read elsewhere this could be an issue. Sounds very strange to me. How many sites actually maintain constant traffic 24/7, unless they are mega international sites? What's the work around to prevent this? What happens if/when a site is suspended. Does this mean pages can not be accessed?
@Petr Snobelt: "For members in separate install you can try use openid from projects section." Not sure what you refer to. Would that mean an administrator for all sites could be created once and have access to all sites with the same ID/password?
re low usage sites: The effect of this happening is that the next time the application is accessed it will have a slower than usual load time. It does not mean pages will not be accessable. A work around is to subscribe to a ping service to keep the site active. It is also configurable in IIS7 but it is unlikely you will have access to this setting in a shared hosting environment.
For performance, I don't think it will be too much of an issue. I don't see it as being any different to 1 one large site so it just depends on the server specs. Also wouldn't one application + 1 DB take up a lot less resources than 20+ apps?
Concering the multiple logins for all the sites, couldn't you activate the ActiveDirectory authentication in your starting image?
Just to chip in:
I have a multisite running on one database, on a VPS, dual core 2.5ghz processors and 3gb of memory installed.
There are 31 sites and especially the first few days were very busy with 10,000 visitors a day and still there are thousands of visitors half a year later. This has caused absolutely no speed or memory problems for use, the site has been performing very very well. Better than expected even, as I haven't even turned caching on at all.
As others have said before, if your sites are rather similar, it can definately be recommended to run them all in one instance.
Just make sure your total page load time stays rather low (we try to keep it under a second). It's easy to find out which parts of a page take a long time to load (add ?umbDebugShowTrace=true to your querystring) and it is not difficult to optimize peformance. For example, we did a bit of optimization by not using "//" in XSLT as this will select all of the 60,000+ nodes. Also, we created a media caching package, but that was only necessary for Umbraco versions lower than 4.5. We had to do little other optimization though.
Hope this helps!
Started the project yesterday and met our server/system admininistrator today for the first time, We have been hashing ideas, largely based on my knowledge of Umbaco (thanks to ALL so far for the great tips and feed) and his experience running the servers at the firm.
@Paul Blair: Our sites run on our own server, so I assume we can tweak IIS. The sys admin tells me we are running Win Server 2008/SQL Express. Effeciency is one thing of which I am uncertain, which is a major reason for this post. I would much prefer 1 install. The question I raised when creating this post is: what are the potential threats/down-sides. I'm still a bit on the fence, but leaning toward 1 install after reading several threads, including Sebastiaans recent post.
@Rik Helsen: If I knew how to "activate the ActiveDirectory authentication in our starting image", I suppose that might be an option ;~) I'm sort of following you, Rik - but at a great distance. The server admin should be able to help me out, I imagine, if we go with multiple installs.
@Sebastiaan Janssen: Firstly, 60,000+ nodes sounds a bit insane to me. Kudos if that is managable for you. Perhaps I am organizationally challenged, but I fear becoming overwhelmed by the navigational complexity that could arise with multiple sites in Umbraco. Currently, the sites run on Sitecore, which has the advantage of providing content storage that resembles a prototypical explorer, you know, with "folders", multiple organizational levels and the like. However, our sites are not nearly nearly as large as yours, I am assuming. Your feedback is definitely appreciated and quite helpful. Food for thought.
Thanks again for all for the great responses thus far. You're all champs :-) If I could share some karma, I would. But I can only send you good vibes and much thanks at this point, Your help is much appreciatedand / well received.
Dwayne, it's not that bad actually, we just had a good hard look at the way in which we need to organize the content and in this case we just ended up putting then in folders by alphabet (first letter) because that made sense for our scenario. Organization always seems to be key to a succesful CMS implementation.
As soon as you have all your different sites each under a single node, everything will surely fall into place quite easily. Also, a quick tip: it is very convenient to store site-wide settings in the top node for that site, easily accessible through XSLT by referring to the ancestor-or-self node at level 1.
Anyway, if you have future questions, we're all here to help, don't hesitate to ask.
Good to hear, Sebastiaan. When you say "it is very convenient to store site-wide settings in the top node for that site", which node are you refering to? The first Document inside the site node?
When i mention open Id, this is project page, but I don't try it myself http://our.umbraco.org/projects/website-utilities/openid-for-umbraco
Dwayne: this is how my content tree looks, so on each of the "site folders" I have settings, like google analytics account, google maps api key, and so on:
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