Didn't know where to fit this, but it feels this is the most suitable section of the forum for this. I've been tracking the multiple domain issue for the past few years, keeping in mind an idea that i've never developed yet.

I would like to offer simple websites that have about 8 possible page types and I will arrange the CMS so that the information is updated/done via DOM, not the SiteTree. My idea is to have a business hosting, Silverstripe installed and it would serve to manage multiple (even hundreds) of such simple websites. I imagined I could have nodes in the main SiteTree that are "owned" by an owner of a domain, each one has their own little folder under the assets or Upload thing and they never see any content from outside of their scope.

So here are the questions I haven't come across anywhere - maybe someone has a thought? I don't really expect solutions, I'm still in the planning / brainstorming phase :)

1. Each user will buy their domain and it will be hosted on our server. Is there a way for a domain to access the resources of the CMS (that, presumably, is somehow on the same machine but probably under a different user). We're talking some shared images, templates, but separate custom uploaded images, texts etc. If it helps, I don't think it wouldn't be a problem for the user to access/administer his site via a joint domain (e.g. easywebsites.com :) but as long as the domain's subfolder would somehow know how to display the correct node / subpages of the CMS accordingly. Any other way to do that apart from .htacces? (that could work for one user, but I just don't see a .htaccess holding information to redirect to sapphire for 100 users hehe - maybe I'm wrong?)

2. I've even thought of something like a simple config file that would then just read the html from another domain and display it? But that just doesn't feel right. Most probably the links in the Silverstripe generated HTML would be wrong anyway.

3. To go a step further. What would be the best way to automate adding such a user to Silverstripe? E.g. I'd let's say write the necessary domain info, username, password, folders etc in it and then run the script and the appropriate nodes would be added to the SiteTree? How is that done today (e.g. add a page via a script?)

I have no clue what this does, I've been thinking about this so long and keep googling for "Multisite Silverstripe" - maybe someone out there has a similar problem or thought.

Thank you!

I've been thinking about something like this as well - it'll be great for small 5-10 page sites. But then I found squarespace for hosting my smaller sites! .

How I was thinking for it is using the subsites module (which does support multiple domains) and having a script which creates a new Subsite and a group. Then add a new member account to the newly created group. This group would without subsites access and they would *not* be added to the administrators group. You can assign subsite access on a group basis so you would assign the Allowed Group on the newly created group to the created subsites.

You can create subsites, members via PHP simply by creating an object and calling write() so you should be able to get quite far with a couple lines of code.