[BlueOnyx:08733] Re: Stats question

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Chris,

> This leads 
> me to think that, as with other occasional issues, if you need full 
> functionality of everything the GUI has to offer, then your best bet is 
> to load as a site, rather than a subdomain.

All in all the whole subdomain integration is suboptimal.

There are more things it doesn't than it does:

- Doesn't work well with suPHP
- Doesn't CMU well (neither import nor export)
- Stats don't work as the logging is done differently
- Renaming of a subdomain breaks aliasses

All in all base-subdomains.mod would need a major rewrite, or it needs to be 
scrapped and replaced with a different approach.

99% of the code in base-subdomains.mod is still unchanged from the code that 
Brian initially contributed to the project and about half of the problems that 
arose since then are related to features that weren't around when he wrote the 
module. So it's neither bad code or bad design. No, it was good for what it 
was initially designed for. But it doesn't scale well enough for our new 
purposes and getting it back up to par will be quite some effort.

In the end I think we'll be better off to scrap this module and to pursue a 
different approach: Allow siteAdmin's to be responsible for more than one 
Vsite. From 1 Vsite to a configureable number of Vsites. That way the 
siteAdmin can then create additional sites (if need be) and can treat them as 
subdomains (in that case the new Vsite must run on the same IP and only the 
hostname part may be different) or as fully blown separate sites (different 
FQDN and maybe even different IP).

That would eleminate all problems in one go, because as far as suPHP, CMU, 
statistics, logging, user management, email- or web server aliasses are 
concerned: It would be handled like any other (regular) Vsite as well. Just 
that it's somehow "linked" to a siteAdmin who has privileges for more than one 
Vsite.

But this requires roughly a week of coding and testing. Somehow I don't really 
see me picking up on that anytime soon.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber