How can I centralize an entire website engine?

Question

Prefer responses via php or ROR if possible!

Example:

The slide widget at www.slide.com can be deployed anywhere on the web. But the slide developers have centralized edit capabilities to these widgets. A change to the widget core, will update across all installed widgets.

Can this be done with an entire website engine?

Say I coded the Wordpress engine. Is it possible for me to deploy my engine on my customers own servers at their own domain while still being able to control/update/edit the core and have it update all my clients engines.

The main reason is for clients to have ownership of their content and brand. A customer may need to establish his online presence and so he needs his own domain, but he still can pay a service to have his engine professionally managed and upkept.

Answer 1

As far as I can tell the flash objects in the slide.com widgets are hosted on their servers, all that is deployed elsewhere is markup that references the widget similar to embedding a YouTube video. Unless there's something there that I don't see.

There are 2 ways you could do what I think you're asking.

1) You could provide a service that hosts the web application on your servers. The user could point their domain to your server and you would run the application under a virtual host and give them administrator access to the application to brand it. Essentially you would be providing a web hosting service with the application engine pre-installed.

2) You could allow them to deploy it on their servers and provide automatic updates that would download and replace the application files when they are changed in the core. However this would require script write access to every folder where scripts are stored, so it would pose security problems on their server.

Depending on the type of application you could also have much of it deployed as services on your servers, and some type of basic wrapper that is deployed on the customers servers that communicates with your services. You could then centralize all of the business logic and have images and templates and such stored on their servers, and possibly scripts that communicate with their database.