Open Source CMS with linked sub-sections and users

Question

I work at a small college that wants to make "sites" for all of the academic departments (~30). I managed to talk them out of their original idea: 30 individual Wordpress installations. What a maintenance nightmare!

What I'm looking for is a CMS (preferably Python or PHP, as those are my areas of expertise) that can automagically create a subsection (or subsite, whatever the appropriate vernacular) complete with user and a couple of headings based on a template. So, I could just click a button and have a new subsection for a new department complete with its own authorized user, and default subsection headings/menu/pages.

Is this just wishful thinking? I don't mind getting my hands dirty (this would be the whole of my job duties), so what platform would be a good starting point for something like this? Open source is a must for me as I have literally no budget, and I'm probably going to have to dig pretty deep into the application.

Answer 1

Take a look at Drupal or Wordpress MU. With a little bit of scripting and code I think these could do what you need.

Take a close look at Wordpress MU especially. If they were talking about 30 Wordpress installations then Wordpress MU might be exactly what you want. It provides a unified administration backend to manage multiple wordpress blogs. It's based on the software used to run Wordpress.com. I used to work in an Academic Technologies department as a student programmer and while I was there I helped them get an installation of it set up. Let me tell you - compared to MovableType and Blackboard - it was a dream.

Answer 2

Take a look at Pinax. It uses a templating system to rapidly develop sites. Pinax was created around the idea that there are 'types' of websites and its ridiculous to keep writing the same code over and over for similar sites. This means you could use one of their pre-built templates or create your own and then when you want to build a new site just invoke the template and the site will be ready to go.

Answer 3

Plone does this use case very well. The WebLion project at Penn State is using Plone to deliver many such sub-sites for their university. You may be interested in their work.

http://plone.org
http://weblion.psu.edu