19 Mar

multi-tenanted CMS architecture

Last week, I did a talk at the Dublin Google buildings titled “Multi-tenanted CMS Architecture using PHP”.

Here are the slides that I used:

While talking with Google’s Brian Brazil, he explained that it is actually more efficient to use one database and many separate tables, than to separate each installation into a separate database, so one point I made (that KV-WebME uses separate databases per site) will change in the future.

I think the talk went down well, by the number of questions afterwards.

Last year, I gave a similar talk, and made the mistake of including way too much PHP in it – I had assumed that the audience would be composed of PHP developers. This year, there is just one slide of PHP, and that’s just to illustrate one possible way to build a proxy config.

Lesson’s learned for this time:

  • Talk slower. When I’m explaining something, I tend to try to get as much in as possible, so speak very fast. This makes it hard to hear what I’m saying.
  • More pictures, less words!
  • Stats. Some of the questions were around how efficient certain parts of the method were – particularly on the overhead of piping a file through a script as opposed to simply delivering it via Apache. I need to come up with numbers for that.

Overall, I was happy with this presentation.