Re: Advice sought on PHP site maintenance

George Pitcher wrote:

Hi, I manage several sites for my company. Some are running our own service to about 80 customers and others are running a service for some (5 and growing) of our customers. Its the latter one that I need advice on. I have an application where each customer has a website on our service. The functionality and layout are almost identical throughout these sites and I am striving to move any differences into configuration files. However, when I make a change, I then need to make that change on each site. I would like, if possible to maintain a single set of web pages and have that work for all sites. I currently use PEAR::DB and Smarty templating. The current url syntax is www.mysite.com/client/ and I would like to keep them thinking that they each have their own unique site. Can anyone suggest a structure for this?

If I'm reading you right, you're looking to keep a group of scripts/classes in one place that all sites can draw from. If this is the case, you could always set a global include directory (make it read only for the users of your service), and configure that path in Apache's httpd.conf or an .htaccess. I do this on our box (all the sites are ours, but when I have to update Smarty/PEAR/custom scripts, I like to just do it in one place). <VirtualHostDirectory> -><VirtualHost1> -><docs> -><VirtualHost2> -><docs> -><VirtualHost3> -><docs> -><VirtualHost4> -><docs> -><GlobalInclude> -><PEAR> -><Smarty> -><Custom> So on, and so forth. -- John C. Nichel ÜberGeek KegWorks.com 716.856.9675 john@kegworks.com