I work for a web design company that currently hosts several hundred sites for our clients. Most of these sites are small 4-6 page brochure-type sites.
We currently use a CMS that was built specifically for us that lets each site owner log in and edit text and images on their site. However we feel we've outgrown our old CMS and are evaluating our options. We will either create a new CMS from scratch or use an off-the-shelf CMS, and as such we're looking at SilverStripe. We would leave all existing sites on the old CMS and use the new CMS for any new sites going forward, so we don't really need a migration path.
I've got a bunch of questions on using SS in an environment like ours:
Is SS multi-site? I.e. can one installation of SS handle multiple (possibly several hundred) individual sites, with each site being separate? By "separate" I mean that each site would have it's own domain name and a CMS user that can edit just that site's content, without seeing the content of any other site (eg we DON'T want a shared asset library, each site would need it's own set of images, stylesheets, etc).
Are we able to specify what parts of a page our clients can edit on their site? For example we would want them to be able to edit main body text and images, but not be able to edit text in the footer or other parts of the page. We also don't want them to be able to add new pages, edit meta tag details in the HTML head (because we've carefully structured these for SEO purposes), etc.
If SS isn't really multi-site (in the sense that I've outlined above) then the alternative option would be a separate installtion of SS for each site. I can't find any disk space requirements for SS, does anyone know what an average installation uses? The down-side to doing it this way is the problem of upgrading SS or modules, imagine having to upgrade 500 copies of SS!
So is SS a realistic option for us or should I be looking elsewhere?