As soon as you have:
-different INIs
-different DB
-different storage i guess that there will be no problem at all in having a single istance of ez running multiple sites. This is actually what I'm having on my dev box (while in production every site is running on a different installation, because they're on different servers/shared hosts).
The only issue that comes to my mind is that as soon as you upgrade to a new release you have to check whether each and every site is having any issue, while with separate installation you can upgrade and check one site at a time.
As Daniele said, there's nothing really wrong in having one installation of eZ for multiple sites as long as everything is separated.
But as far as I'm concerned, I'm not a big fan of that method... if disk space is not an issue, you should use one installation per project. The main reason I see is upgrade... indeed if you have one install, you only have to upgrade once, but everything has to be tested at the same time, and if you have applied patches to your installation (we don't recommend that, but it happens...), it can be a problem.
Well I think I've found (or made up) few advantages of multiple installations of ez.
1. When you have to move a site to another server
2. Grant access to ez code of particular site to client (otherwise they ask for code and you have to give access to the common code ) 3. My hosting server which I recently checked and it looks like windows (i.e. it has foldersnamed mydomainname.com for each domain instead of /home/usr/public_html) , and looks like I won't have a root access to play around with apache . Also I didnot find any addon domain options in my hosting which means I have to use redirection which is slow.
After discussions I think I'll go for single installations.
Just to make shure caught the idea. What you're suggesting is:
1.- On the same machine -. running APACHE, Mysql intall as many copies of EZ as sites I want to create. 2.- Configure each one separetely - it's own EZDatabase (Ez1, EZ2, etc), and go thru EZ Setup process.
Cons: I'll use some extra space Pros: Bette control on a one on one upgrade process.
If I understood right - patches shouln't be applied on the same development installation? How then do you apply ugrades?
I have to use
www.site1.com -> siteaccess portuguese of site 1
en.site1.com -> siteaccess english of site 1 es.site1.com -> siteaccess spanish of site 1
www.site2.com -> siteaccess portugese of site 2 fr.site2.com -> siteaccess french of site 1
because of this situation, i am really thinking in move to multiple instalations (upgrade will be more dificult)
My situation is exactly the same as Paulo's regarding multiple languages. Actually this is a big flaw in ezpublish's siteaccess selection for me. It would be great to be able to do 'mapping' for url-based siteaccesses in combination with the host, e.g.
anyway, regarding the initial question - this limitation aside we are happily running 20 siteaccesses for 5 different sites from one central ezpublish install, with more coming. using sym-links for design and settings it is possible to allow control of each site on an individual basis, and we have different extension settings for different sites using [ActiveAccessExtensions] on a per-access basis. we're also running from svn which makes upgrading all of the sites at the same time an easy task - this was the main reason for choosing a centralised install.