Network Manager

btopro - August 24, 2009 - 20:19

*SCREENCAST NOW AVAILABLE!!

Part 1 - http://bit.ly/PGu8J
Part 2 - http://bit.ly/yR6Zy
Part 3 - http://bit.ly/BLWrU
Network Modules Feature walk through - http://bit.ly/cW4q3
Network Watchdog Feature - http://bit.ly/17UUyA

This module will allow you to manage a vast number of sites from one Drupal site. The purpose of this project is aggregation of information and link generation to help you accomplish common tasks faster. In case you're concerned, there is no permission escalation going on because you still have to click to access the other sites pages to set the settings you want. This is merely aggregating information for you at the moment. In the future it will allow for modifying settings across the network (hopefully) but is stil a ways off. Here's what you get in this module and will get in the future:

What's there now:
*Network Status Report -- Spend minutes and hours going between status pages on your the sites in your infrastructure making sure you don't have any database updates to run or cron jobs? This is part of what this will solve (v 1.0)
*Review module selections -- See what modules are activated across all the sites in your network (v 1.1)
*Total up columns - see the total number of modules active across sites you define or (more importantly) how many users of role x you have across your network (v 1.2)
*Cross Network Watchdog-- See an aggregate list of all dead links via a compiled watchdog listing (v 1.2)
*Network connector rolled in -- You can define the address of each site on the admin/settings/network_manager page. (v 1.3)

Road-map (in order):
*Set settings network wide -- Have a setting that needs to change on EVERY site you maintain? Set a setting across all sites on your network, and only for the ones that have the setting available.
*Cleaner Watchdog implementation -- Current implementation is good for a snapshot but needs some usability / functionality clean up to be easier to use and return pagers of results
*Check out http://drupal.org/project/densite if you're looking for this functionality nowish because this will be in the queue for a long time here

Way down the road / may be out of scope at the moment (will require version 2 of Backup and Migrate which is still dev hence no support exists yet)
*Create new sites -- Create sites by cloning other ones database structure and setting up sym links automatically (if you have the ability)
*Create derivative sites -- Clone a site specific to the user creating it. For example, "blog.com/newblog_btopro" from the original "blog.com/newblog"

This is born out of the Course Manager module and discussions with several universities about what they needed in order to scale without increasing in staff.