Vhost standards, etc...

[Tyler Mitchell]

On 15-Dec-06, at 6:23 AM, Kanhaiya kale ( कન્હૈযা  
ਕਾளெ ) wrote:

> Hi jo walsh,
> Yeah it can be possible to handle multiple drupal instance with   
> little  difference.
> As soon HyperJohnGraham  create a virtualhost for this on  
> telascience server, i will copy current drupal instance there and  
> make some policy to share themes and modules.

If we've had this discussion already, please remind me.. but it seems  
we need to agree on our approach for handling subdomains/vhosts on  
our new install.

This affects both mailing lists and drupal sites equally as much.   
Because our historic infrastructure automatically creates subdomains  
for every project, we have a legacy of many many subdomains that are  
marginally useful.

I think we've already discussed mailing lists, but I hope we can move  
to a format like:
project at lists.osgeo.org and project-dev at lists.osgeo.org

Instead of the historic discuss at project.osgeo.org and  
dev at project.osgeo.org.

Similarly on the www/drupal side, we have http://project.osgeo.org,  
even for projects that have a marginal web presence.  I believe it is  
safe to say that maintaining this level of vhost management is more  
painful than simply adding node-based drupal urls like:
http://osgeo.org/project
That way there is no vhost set up required and CMS managers can do  
dirty work without bothering sysadmins.  Of course, we have some  
legacy usage of http://project.osgeo.org - but can we do some  
rewrites to handle this in the meantime?

I am innately opposed to having multiple drupal instances unless we  
really really need to.  I don't assume I'm correct in my logic, but I  
think this is a good time to aim for simplicity.  So I ask, at what  
point do we want/need to keep content all in the same drupal  
instance?  Can we aim to reduce our need to use subdomains?  When  is  
it beneficial to use them instead?  Can we 'theme' different parts of  
a drupal site, i.e. by group? (e.g. so http://osgeo.org/project1/*  
has different theme than http://osgeo.org/project2/* )?

Other thoughts?  Am I being too complicated or too simplistic?

Tyler