Working with technology can be fun when you’re presented with a challenge and need to find a solution. One of my latest tasks is to figure out how to manage more than 100 Web sites, each with its own domain (not subdomain or subdirectory), in the most effective way possible. Some sites will be blogs, others will be more traditional Web site.

I’m very fond of WordPress and my initial thinking was to figure out how to make it work for my needs. I particularly like the way that themes work in WordPress and the ease of designing, customizing the interface will be a factor in implementing all these sites.

And though I do have a dedicated server for all these sites I don’t want to have a hundred instances of WordPress. I would like to have one application installed that can manage sites over multiple domains.

Keeping WordPress in mind I looked at WordPress MU and Lyceum, which are both forks of WordPress designed for multiple users. There are some interesting aspects to those projects that require further examination.

I’ve also collected a number of URLs on this topic, particularly relating to the use of WordPress that I may later add to this post.

For my needs it would be even better to be able to manage these sites all from one admin interface since these will be sites all maintained by one company rather than a lot of different users unaffiliated with each other. So, this makes things a little more complicated.

Also, multilingual capabilities will be nice since some of these sites will be in English and Spanish while some also will be in French.

I started to broaden my search to other content management systems. Drupal immediately came to mind since it’s an impressive project. I thought about Joomla! but it doesn’t seem to support multiple sites from one installation. Seems like Drupal offers a good option for many of the tasks that I need. Will definitely be examining it closer.

But I also decided to think about other CMS options and headed over to the CMS matrix, which lists hundreds of content management systems. I didn’t know that there were so many…not sure why the world needs so many, particularly the ones that costs > $75,000 but, hey, whatever …

A tool that seems very attractive to me is Typo3, particularly for its multi-lingual support and a number of other options. Since I’m less familiar with Typo3 I’m going to be spending some time exploring it. The drawbacks that I gather so far is that it has a high learning curve (no big worry to me) and it is very resource intensive (again, no worry here since I have a dedicated server for this project). Coming next, more info about Typo3….