Are there any decent open-source multi-tenant CMS's out there?

Question

We're looking for a CMS that we can use as the basis for a new product we're rolling out.

As it's principally a content based thing, we need to base everything on a CMS, but there's a few things we need:

• As we're supporting tens - hundreds of users, we ideally need a multi-tenant CMS (single shared code base), that can support different designs per site
• As we're selling in functionality, we need something that will let us deploy a new 'module' and switch it on/off on a per site basis
• We prefer stuff that is open source (PHP or Rails, that sort of thing)

Before I consider building something, is there anything out there that's any good?

Answer 1

Plone sounds like it'd do what you want.

It's written in Python, on top of Zope, and supports multiple distinct sites (with distinct and/or shared users, groups, styling). Extra functionality is added through 'products'; there are a number of Free extensions and it's quite easy to write your own too.

Answer 2

We use http://www.alfresco.com/ ...seems to fit your definition . Different designs per site can be achieved with what they call "web scripts" . It supports deployment and branching infrastructure that you can leverage to for your different clients

Answer 3

As we're supporting tens - hundreds of users, we ideally need a multi-tenant CMS (single shared code base), that can support different designs per site

My first thought when I read that was WordpressMU (perhaps with Buddypress if you need groups, etc?), but it might not be "CMS" enough for your needs... you don't elaborate on which features of a CMS you are looking for (media management, workflows, etc), so it's a bit hard to recommend one.

Answer 4

DotNetNuke supports multi-tenant operation, and has a fairly active marketplace for add on modules, skins etc. It has pretty well defined module development interfaces as well.