By Eric Enge

When people get into publishing websites they often start with some very basic ideas. However, the web is wonderfully organic, and things can grow on you. First your site grows in complexity. Then you go get another site. Then another one. And so forth. Eventually you end up with a diverse family of sites and a big headache to go with it.

This leaves you with two major options:

1. Tylenol
2. Setting up a multi-site CMS platform

For those of you thinking about option 2 (or both options together) this article will discuss the issues with running multiple CMS platforms and briefly overview the major solutions available in the market today.

Summary of the Major Problems

Other than a severe headache, here are some of the main problems with dealing with multiple sites:

1. Multiple Hosting Locations: You may have sites hosted with a variety of hosting companies. This alone can cause real issues for us because each hoster provides different server configurations, and may update their software at different times. The interactions between the hosting environment and your site can suddenly change and bring about unexpected problems.

2. Multiple CMS Platforms: Consider the poor webmaster dealing with sites hosted on different CMS platforms. One moment they may dealing with Joomla or Drupal, and then they are dealing with WordPress. Consider the plight of the poor site owner who has to deal with paying enough money to keep a webmaster who is proficient with multiple CMS platforms on board. Ouch!

The issues with this situation are numerous. As alluded to above, the first one is the task of trying to keep staff on board that is proficient to deal with all these different environments. Then there are the various update cycles and widely varying plugin sets.

Anyone who has done heavy duty webmastering knows that unpleasant surprises crop up at the most awkward times. This is true in any software development environment as each tool has its own little quirks. Each one can easily tie up many hours of frustrating work trying to unravel what it is that is taking place.

One CMS Platform? Could Still be Challenging: You are definitely better off if everything is on one platform, but are they all on the same version of the platform? If they are not, then you face the challenging prospect of getting them there. This can be daunting prospect depending on how many different sites you have. The big issue is that there are often interactions between the particular site implementation and the platform, so going through this process will be painful.

Then, when you are done with that, what will the process of keeping it up to date be like? Have 20 sites? That’s 20 updates you need to keep in sync. Multiply this by all the plugins, and you will be running back to get the Tylenol!

Solutions

The notion of multisite CMS solutions is relatively new, but there are a few companies that profess to implement them. However, these companies don’t mean exactly the same thing when they speak about multisite management. One concept is where the CMS provides centralized management of site content, which allows you to publish content to multiple websites. Many of the current CMS solutions refer to this as multisite management, and it is in fact a very helpful feature.

Another level of functionality is management of site resources. These are things such as template HTML, images, javascript files, css, content types. Centralized management of the former site resources is extremely handy in saving manpower for managing families of websites. This is where issues like addressing updates is made so much easier.

I caught up with Pixelsilk CEO Mark Knowles and asked him to give me his top 3 reasons why multisite management of site resources is so important. here is what he told me:

1. Developers need a clean interface to manage HTML/CSS templates, JavaScript, plugins and other resources efficiently.
2. Centralized token management offers the power to execute advanced multi-site campaigns, such as advertising and conversion, and AB testing campaigns.
3. Gives developers straightforward ways to leverage new code work across multiple sites, such as common new modules and functionality.

The following table will provide a quick breakdown of some of the CMS solutions professing to offer multisite management, and what they support at a high level.

Some of these require special configuration. You can get more information on setting up WordPress as a multisite CMS here. Jentla is an extension to a Joomla installation that provides Joomla with basic capabilities for managing site content across sites. Drupal requires add-ins to work as well.

Plone has a powerful feature known as Workflow that manages content across websites, but it is a little bit cumbersome to use. It is otherwise very well structured and very clean, though it has less adoption than Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.

Pixelsilk was the only solution that I found that provided a strong solution for managing site resources. The concept is a new one, and of particular use to those who need to manage a family of web sites. In fact, the more sites you have the more valuable this feature becomes.

Summary

The best solution for you depends on the exact problems you face, and each of the above solutions deserves a close look. You should consider the effort to port sites into the new CMS, the costs of each solution, and how the specific features map to your needs. For many, working with WordPress, Joomla + Jentla, or Drupal will be attractive because they have developers familiar with those platforms. While not as well known as the other platforms, Pixelsilk provides a very strong solution for multisite resource management, and is well known for its SEO capabilities as well. Mark Knowles also pointed out that developers with industry standard skills like, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript will find Pixelsilk easy to use and master.

Eric Enge is President of Stone Temple Consulting, an SEO firm with offices in Massachusetts and California. He is a frequent contributor to Search Engine Land.

About This e-Solution Spotlight…
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