PressGang is a Django application that makes it easier to manage multiple WordPress installations on a single server. It allows you to install blogs, lock them down, manage users and perform easy rollbacks to previous versions.

PressGang can install any blogs using WordPress 3.0 or greater, and can still perform some basic management tasks on older blogs. For the moment, it is only capable of dealing with blogs installed in subdirectories, and does not support subdomain installations.

Installation

git clone git://github.com/cilcoberlin/pressgang.git
python pressgang/setup.py install
rm -R pressgang

File Structure

1. Create a new Django project.
2. Create a directory that is writable by your app to contain blog versions.
3. Create a directory that is writable by your app to contain per-blog Apache configuration files.
4. Copy the contents of the media/ directory to your site's media/ directory.

Apache

Somewhere in your Apache configuration file, add the following line, replacing CONFIG_DIR with the full path to the directory created in step 2 of the previous section:

Include CONFIG_DIR/*.conf

Settings

1. Add 'pressgang' to the INSTALLED_APPS list in your project's settings.py file.
2. Include 'pressgang.urls' in your project's URL configuration.
3. Provide values for the settings below.

PRESSGANG_APACHE_CONFIGS_DIR A string of the absolute path to the directory that you created to hold per-blog Apache configuration files.

PRESSGANG_APACHE_DOCUMENT_ROOT A string that should match the value of Apache's DocumentRoot.

PRESSGANG_BACKUPS_DIR A string of the absolute path to the directory that you created to hold the blog backup files.

PRESSGANG_DB_ADMIN_PASSWORD A string of the password for the admin use for your MySQL installation.

PRESSGANG_DB_ADMIN_USER A string of the username of the admin user for your MySQL installation.

PRESSGANG_INSTALLERS An optional list containing strings of the full paths to any custom installer packages that you have created. Each item in the list must be on your Python path.

PRESSGANG_MYSQL_PATH The full path to your mysql executable.

PRESSGANG_MYSQLDUMP_PATH The full path to your mysqldump executable.

PRESSGANG_SERVER_BASE A string of the network location (i.e., 'subdomain.server.tld') of the server hosting your blogs.

Standalone Settings*

If PressGang is the only application that you are running, you can use the following values for your settings.py variables, replacing PRESSGANG with the optional URL prefix of your PressGang site, if it is not running in the root of your site.

LOGIN_URL  = 'PRESSGANG/accounts/login'
LOGOUT_URL = 'PRESSGANG/accounts/logout'

To have PressGang handle any 404 or 500 errors, you can set the following values in your main URL configuration.

handler404 = 'pressgang.core.views.handle_404'
handler500 = 'pressgang.core.views.handle_500'

Permissions

Any user that you add to your site must have certain permissions added to their accounts through your project's admin site to be able to use PressGang. The possible permissions, given as how they show up in the list of permissions available to users and groups, are:

pressgang | blog | can install blogs Allows the user to install blogs

pressgang | blog | can manage blogs Allows the user to make changes to the blogs.

pressgang | blog | can view blogs Allows the user to view a list of all installed blogs.

Generally, a user will have all of the above permissions, but it is possible to restrict the permissions if desired.

PressGang provides a flexible API that allows you to provide custom templates for customizing the installation or upgrading of blogs. These templates take the form of standard Python packages and a few optional folders following a simple file structure that PressGang uses to generate configuration rules for a blog.

To create a new template, make a Python package that appears somewhere in your project's PYTHONPATH, making it available for import. In the package's __init__.py module, create a new class called Install that is descended from pressgang.actions.install.InstallAction. This class is the template for the blog configuration. It accepts a wide range of attributes and methods, and the possible values and methods for the class can be figured out by consulting the source code for pressgang.actions.install.InstallAction and the sample installers available in the sample_installers package.

In addition to the above attributes and methods, the Install class can also take options classes in the same manner that a Django model receives Meta options. For examples of how to use and set these options, consult the values of the SiteOptions, AllBlogOptions, ChildBlogOptions, RootBlogOptions and BlogOptions classes used by the sample installers defined in the sample_installers package.

Once you have created a template in Python, you can provide additional PHP files that should be copied to the blog via the mu-plugins/, plugins/ and themes/ directories that can exist in your template's package. The contents of each directory get copied to the wp-content/mu-plugins/ directory of the blog.

With your installer created, you now need to tell PressGang that it exists. To do so, simply add the import path to your package to the PRESSGANG_INSTALLERS list in your project's settings.py file. It will now appear in the list of available installation template when you are using PressGang.