CMS + Fedora Magazine

[Clint Savage]

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 11:23 PM, Basil Mohamed Gohar
<abu_hurayrah at hidayahonline.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-02-05 at 19:55 -0800, Karsten Wade wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 05, 2009 at 10:33:20PM -0000, Simon Birtwistle wrote:
>> > > Karsten,
>> > > I thought we would be able to use a single instance and have different
>> > > domain names point at different "groups".  Have multiple instances to
>> > > do the same thing seems a waste, IMO.
>>
>> IIRC, we discussed this earlier in the process, whether Zikula could
>> handle virtualhosting-like situations.  In general, if one monolithing
>> framework can handle the multiple slices and serving of sub-domains,
>> that's fine with me.
>>
>> However, the way I understand our Infrastructure to work, it may not
>> be much more burden to run multiple instances.  Puppet is going to
>> manage configurations regardless, etc.
>>
>> > There are a couple of technical issues with single-instance.
>> >
>> > 1.  Caching strategies - will certainly be different for the almost entirely
>> > static docs/www subdomains to the more user-oriented docs site.
>>
>> This is true, although I thought we cached by sub-domain so it could
>> do it separately if the Zikula instance were serving different
>> sub-domains.
>>
>> > 2.  Zikula doesn't currently support subdomains running on the same set of
>> > files (though it's easily achieved through symlinks) - and would they use
>> > the same database, or a different database?  If you use different databases
>> > with the same files then upgrades become a hassle
>>
>> Interesting.  For the reasons I say below, I would guess different.
>>
>> > 3.  Striping/server separation - e.g. if the magazine / docs / wherever else
>> > are on different physical servers for load or any other reason.
>>
>> IIUC, this is true -- Infrastructure can more effectively scale
>> sub-domains that are unique to the host.
>>
>> > 4.  Rolling out new features / fixing problems in general - you don't want a
>> > problem adding a new blogging module on the magazine site to take your www
>> > offline through some freak accident.
>>
>> I'm also not clear if there is an intersect between the two content
>> types.  Is there ever going to be a reason to have content migrate
>> from magazine.fp.o to docs.fp.o?  Are we going to share processes and
>> workflows?
>>
>> It doesn't seem like it to me right now, although that might be a
>> bridge we want to cross in the future.
>>
>> This comes up similarly for the knowledgebase idea.  Is
>> e.g. kbase.fedoraproject.org a separate CMS or a part of docs.fp.o?
>>
>> Since the content types are again different (very short, focused,
>> versioned articles v. longer guides maintained across versions), it's
>> probable that having the kbase and docs CMS in the same instance
>> wouldn't matter.
>>
>
> Are separate domains/subdomains really necessary?  Perhaps (and I am not
> sure if Zikula already supports this) we can put "projects" under a URL
> hierarchy rather than individual domains or subdomains.  I know that one
> of the slowest things I experience on a daily basis is having to look up
> a new domain or subdomain name.
>

They are not required, but are a really good idea.  It provides
logical separation when thinking about what a particular application
(in this case CMS) does.  If we keep the same subdomain for all the
structures, we'd logically separate on uri's.  Seems more logical to
me to have it be domains/subdomains as the logical divide.

Cheers,

Clint