Hi! I'm one of the developers hired to implement the blogs for Trygve Lie. As he mentioned in his post, one of our requirements is to set up one blog server for several (say 50) domains, with separate look and feel, and separate blogs and users. One way to do this is of course to install 50 roller servers with 50 database instances. But this would require a lot of database connections that are not shared, and a lot of extra overhead for caching 50 different Roller servers etc.
Instead we plan to extend Roller with an optional multi-domain mode. We are still planning how we can accomplish this, but we now have some ideas. One of our goals is to get our patches accepted in the official Roller source. We want to do this because we want to give something back to the Roller community, and we believe more companies will need this feature. Another reason is that we don't want to maintain a separate set of patches we need to apply to all future versions of Roller before we put them in production. To ensure that we make the changes in a fashion compatible with the rest of the Roller-community, we are now asking for feedback and ideas before we start implementing changes. What's needed here is a way to group "rolleruser"s and "website"s in domains so they can be controlled by domain administrators. The domain administrator also needs to be able to control default themes and available themes for one domain. (ie. blog.comany1.no has a default theme with the Company1-logo at the top, blog.company2.no has a different default theme, and the company1-theme is not available). One way to do this might be to add some extra tables to the database describing the domain. The table will contain name, description, domain settings etc. When a user is added to a domain, a connection between rolleruser and domain is created in a new table called domainuser. When a website is added to a domain, a connection between website and domain is created in a table called domainwebsite to show that a website is part of that domain (ie. a user can exist in more than one domain, and so can a website). The names of the tables are not final yet. The normal behavior in Roller should be left as it is now, but the administrator is given an option to turn on multidomain-mode. When this is enabled, the administrator can add new domains, and add an administrator-user to that domain. Existing websites and users will continue to exist as before under roller/page/sitename, what's new here is a new configuration where a domain administrator can add users, wesites and set configuration for the domain. This could be put under roller/domain/domainname for example. This level would also have functionality like the front page for roller, but would only contain blogs from this domain, a planet uniqe for this domain, and optionally the ability for a user to register for this domain only. (in the background, the user would also be registered as a global rolleruser, but the global site could be filtered out so this would be transparent for users). To make the sentral server invisible to the end user, the URLs must be filtered and rewritten so blog.company1.no is translated to bigblog.no/roller/domain/company1, and blog.company1.no/blogname is translated to bigblog.no/roller/page/blogname etc. This functionality should be done by mod_rewrite or a UrlRewriteFilter and be kept out of Roller, but should be possible and documented to allow others to do the same. What we need now is some feedback on what mistakes we are likely to make here, and how you would like us to proceed so we can get patches upstream and not break your incredible application. Ideas on how to do this would certainly help! -- Regards, Henning Kulander Systems consultant Linpro AS - Norway's #1 Linux company
