Centralized CMS idea : need some expertise.

[Sleidia]

Hi guys

I'm considering the reprogramming of my own CMS solution into a centralized CMS in order to protect it against careless people who could try to resell it without my consent.

Basically, the CMS would be located on my own server and would "pilot" my clients' sites remotely. Clients would have to log on my server to manage their sites. The DB (for the content) would be on my server. The images and directories would be on the clients' servers.

Pros:
1. CMS updates benefits to all clients
2. Any basic webhost (even free ones) can be used for the remote files.
3. No PHP file encryption needed (ie: IonCube, PhpShield, SourceGuardian, etc.)
4. PHP file encryption can be set up only on my own server, the one that hosts the CMS

Cons:
1. My DB server must listen and obey to outside connections (security issue)
2. If the DB fails, all the sites fail.

What do you think of the idea?

But here is the most important question about PHP:

I don't know how easy it is to freely manage files and directories from a remote server using PHP. I've never done it before and I have no clue about it.

So, someone has done that before?
Any info on how to do it?

Thanks a lot

 

[nego78]

Don't do that.
Use something like ioncube.

 

[jpadie]

I don't know how easy it is to freely manage files and directories from a remote server using PHP. I've never done it before and I have no clue about it.

not difficult since you will be handling all content delivery based on some parameters. the physical location etc of the local/remote files becomes largely irrelevant. you'd effectively be using each of the local installations as proxies for your content, probably implementing some local side cache to improve performance.

key downsides to me are not the sngle point of failure (which you can solve by building redundancy into your system) but (i) performance; (ii) linearly increased bandwidth costs to you.

you might be able to mitigate (i) by saying that all your clients need to use the same host that you do.

to improve page load times (still on performance) you could look at having the page framework load independently of the content. then load the content through ajax calls. that would/might improve the "speediness" feel of the application.

 

[Sleidia]

nego78,

Solutions like IonCube, PhpShield, SourceGuardian and alike are impossible to implement on some shared environments that either prevent php.ini edition or disable the dl() function needed or the runtime installation.

And I want my clients' websites to run on almost any server.

 

[Sleidia]

Thanks jpadie

But I'm afraid I didn't understand that part :

not difficult since you will be handling all content delivery based on some parameters. the physical location etc of the local/remote files becomes largely irrelevant. you'd effectively be using each of the local installations as proxies for your content, probably implementing some local side cache to improve performance.

It's Chinese for me

 

[spencer95]

Hi guys. I've been working on a system called cmsflow that does this. It's still in beta, but it currently works well for all of the sites that I use it for. It also allows you to export blogs.

I would appreciate feedback and suggestions etc.

The address is

http://www.cmsflow.com

Dylan

 

[Sleidia]

I would appreciate feedback and suggestions etc.

Sorry but I'm not impressed at all.
Looks like you've created a mere Blog editor.

With a real CMS you're supposed to be able to create any site you want with support of e-commerce, blogs, auctions, hotel reservations, etc.

And you idea of raw files export doesn't allow the edition of complex database based websites.

And changes made from a centralized CMS should be realtime otherwise it becomes quite a hassle to have to export again and again.