One of the best things about the ONEsite platform is its ability to run multiple websites side by side with minimal setup.  These sites may be dedicated to targeted verticals, extensions of the main property with unified sign on or even microsites dedicated to a particular promotional campaign.  The possibilities are limitless and allow your webmasters and marketing team flexibility in how to structure how their user base interacts with their brand(s).

Multisite allows for entertainment clients such as Fox.com to manage standalone shows such as American Idol on a dedicated domain name while other shows such as Glee, Bones and House may have communities on the main Fox.com domain.  Additionally, it allows for publishing companies such as News International's The Sun to have a standalone MySun community but also have a SunVote microsite dedicated to polls, surveys and petitions.  Our cross domain technology and advanced SSO capabilities allow for a seamless user experience.

ONEsite was architected from the ground up to support administration of multiple sites and it shows via the feature set and the ease of setup and maintenance per site.  We believe the multisite capabilities within our CMS and our social features such as the User Newsfeed are important in numerous ways:

•    Fewer resources required to launch subsequent websites
•    Lowered total cost of ownership (TCO) through shared moderation and administration interfaces as well as capability for shared layouts or feature sets
•    Advanced content distribution capabilities (i.e. content bubbling up to parent networks)
•    Easy microsite creation
•    Unified CRM user base across multiple properties

Our background as the first shared webhosting company on the Internet and as a registrar running hundreds of thousands of domain names reinforced our early ONEsite architectural decisions.  We realized back in 2004 that we needed to develop functionality supporting those customers wishing to run multiple highly customized sites on top of our infrastructure.  Some of our earliest clients were running dozens of websites on our platform and over the years our multisite capabilities have continued to grow as media, entertainment and publishing clients continue to advance our own internal roadmap.

Although many multisite implementations are unique there are several common types of multisite setups which are commonly used.  At ONEsite we’ve often run networks structured like the following:

Types of Multisite Setups

• Multiple Standalone Properties
  • with or without shared single-sign-on
• Multiple Integrated Properties (publications, sports league teams, etc.)
• Microsites
•  Public & Private Networks (i.e. two linked sites—one public company site plus one intranet site for employees)

How it Works
Users and groups on the ONEsite platform are organized under nodes which themselves are organized under networks.  Any given user, group, node or network may exist on a domain name, subdomain name and optional user/group subdirectory.  This flexibility allows for maximum SEO and easy microsite creation capabilities.

Users are able to interact with any node within the network (if decided so by the network operator).  User session persistence and roles are available throughout the network so moderators and editorial staff may manage users and content easily across nodes.  Furthermore, content has the capability to bubble up from user or group pages to node aggregation pages and ultimately to network aggregation pages.

Content created by users on different nodes may be collected on a single unified profile page for them, and from a unified hub they may keep tabs on all nodes or groups with which they’ve become affiliated.  Thus, interaction or content creation may occur at points which make the most sense for the user experience and aggregated up to where the network operator envisions.  The newsfeed system in the ONEsite platform natively supports activities from child nodes flowing into parent networks.  Thus on sites such as Big Pond Sport activity on individual team level (Sydney Swans) may bubble up to league aggregation pages (AFL).
 
At ONEsite we’re devoted to ensuring that our users have the best possible tools available to build incredible destinations on the web.  We continue to invest significantly in multisite capabilities as we believe they solve a major problem found in most CMSes.

One of my favorite projects recently has been the ONEsite Analytics & Activity Dashboard which has added many new features and is under active development.  Because we come from a web hosting background we have always been very interested in capturing as much information as possible about both the traffic on our sites and the actual health of our servers and their public and private services.  As a very client-focused company we have strived to provide as much information as possible to our clients through our Control Panel.

Statistics have been an important part of the ONEsite platform from the very beginning.  We offered robust statistics on blog traffic when we first launched the ONEsite blogging capabilities many years ago.  As our traffic and number of incredible customers has grown over the years we have continued to gather large amounts of data about the sites running on the ONEsite and present this information to our customers in the Control Panel for their network.

We began a project in Q4 last year headed by Evan Stenmark to modernize the way we collect and log data as well as collate, analyze and package as much as possible in the Control Panel for our customers to use.  We see this as a key initiative because the platform generates much data which is key to understanding the activity of the community and its members and how it grows both organically and virally.  Many of our customers use 3rd party Analytics such as Omniture or Google Analytics to track pageviews or referrals; however, the ONEsite servers actually collect much more information than is available by these 3rd party companies.  In order to describe how I need to describe a bit about our backend architecture.

At ONEsite we use PHP extensively and developed a PHP Event System as part of our core architecture several years ago.  This event system is a key element in everything from our user content generation flows to our moderation capabilities and also allows for a lot of our unparalleled customization and integration capabilities.  Our event system was inspired by many of the excellent capabilities within ActionScript 3.0.

Essentially, all user interactions on the platform trigger events in our backend code which may in turn trigger other events.  Thus, if a user writes a blog post in our system it may trigger an event such as POST-PUBLISHED.  The platform has the capability of attaching multiple event listeners to an event which may in turn run core features within the platform or custom features enabled for single networks.  Thus, everything from blog post premoderation to blog post pinging to custom data warehousing about blogs may be achieved by attaching event listeners to the POST-PUBLISHED event.

The ONEsite platform utilizes hundreds of distinct events to power all of our bountiful features.  Networks on the ONEsite platform generate hundreds of millions events on any given day.  Knowledge about these events is very useful for analytics purposes and thus we decided to tightly integrate our events system with our analytics capabilities.  In order to do so we began to log events which occur on the platform and all relevant event metadata about that specific event or metadata shared by all events.

Because this generated a significant amount of information we decided to heavily invest in a new backend architecture to store all of this data.  We chose to use an open source technology, Scribe, to log all of the events on the platform.  Scribe was originally developed by Facebook and has been key to their scaling to hundreds of millions of users.

Scribe allows us to store and organize massive amounts of information collected by the servers in our datacenters and to access that information historically.  However, in order to actually generate value from that information store we needed to use other tools.  Principally among these tools is Hive which as their wiki says:  "a data warehouse infrastructure built on top of Hadoop."  Hive allows us to run queries ranging from "How many forum posts were made this week compared to the same week last year?" to "Do users who choose Blue as their favorite color upload more photos than other users?"

Hive, along with other Hadoop tools and custom code, generates the data which is presented to networks in our Dashboard.  The ONEsite Dashboard allows network operators to quickly see the overall health of their network as well as run reports for marketing campaigns or other initiatives.  We are continually working on more advanced capabilities in the Dashbaord to give network operators access to more network vital information, more demographic analysis of its users, and more trends occuring within the community.

Understanding both who the end users of the ONEsite platform are and how they use the tools we provide is key to the success of our company and the sites we run for our clients.  We believe our Event system and our Analytics Dashboard provide ONEsite customers with valuable and necessary information to achieve their community goals and as such ongoing development into Analytics is a key item on our roadmap.