Comment gérer un gros paquet de (4) sites avec le gestionnaire de réseau

Network Manager is an Aegir-esk concept of one site that helps you manage the development of a larger group of sites as a site admin. It’s being born out of a proprietary internal project called course manager used to have one site be able to replicate others in a loosely defined network. Network Manager teams up with the Network Connector module to allow an admin to get a high level overview of all the sites they care about on the same server. It runs across multisite installation and across versions 5,6 and 7 of drupal which is also nice when it comes to staging large sets of sites on servers :)

Installation and configuration are very simple and more or less amounts to turning on the network manager on one site and then turning on the network connector on all the others you care about. It’s difficult to fully describe what it is this module does but it does provide some very helpful analytics based on essentially running the same query across all the sites you care about and putting the results in a table. Here’s just a few of the use-cases.

Use case: “I want to make sure all my crons are running correctly”
Answer: Go to network manager, look at the column called “Last cron run” and make sure all of the sites have the same date as their last successful run.

Use case: “Clean URLs should be turned on all of my sites”
Answer: Go to network manager, look at “Clean URLs” column. Look for all the rows that say “No”. Click No to be taken to the settings page for that site so you can change the setting.

Use case: “All sites should be running DHTML Menus”
Answer: Go to network modules page, select DHTML menus, see all sites running and not running that module. Click to be taken to the module configuration page to enable it on the sites that don’t have it.

http://drupal.org/project/network_manager (lots of screencasts)

I’m sure they’ll be lots of questions about where this is going, why it exists and if it’s too similar to other infrastructure development projects and that’s why I want to talk about / demonstrate it since it’s only about a month old and has had . It would be great to have this as a side-car to a project like Multisite-manager or the Aegir system or to have this remain an alternative to both of those and chart a niche going forward w/o overlap.