Any solutions for managing all properties from one system?

Question

I'm looking for a solution to manage/keep track of the different domains and sites I maintain. I manage multiple domains with numerous sites, subdomains, many instances of CMS and other web apps, and keeping track of many of the details involved with running a well managed network is difficult.

Ideally it would be something that has an interface with which I could keep track of status of things like various robots.txt files, htaccess content, tracking, online status, etc.

Essentially an at-a-glance way to keep track of the status of things, without having to manually FTP or log into several places and open a thousand separate files. It might also include something like a maintenance calendar/scheduler.

I haven't had much luck finding something mostly because I'm not sure what exactly I should be looking for in terms of search terms or genre of software, and what's available. What should I be looking for? Web asset management? Site audit? Server audit? Nothing I've tried searching for seems to be in the right direction. Any pointers or suggestions would be appreciated. What types of solutions are available?

Answer 1

I'm not entirely sure what you are exactly looking for but I have similar issues and this is how I handle the pain:

• Use Passpack.com to store your logins for CMS's, databases etc. Pass pack has a "1 click login" feature that is very useful for gettingo the relevant admin panels quickly.
• If you have a lot of sites using a particular CMS try to set up a centralised core so you only have to update the core files to update all your sites at once.
• Platforms such as wordpress have multi-site manager plugins.
• Use Google analytics to easily track statistics across many sites.
• Use Google webmaster tools to keep track of robot crawl errors and issues with robots.txt/htaccess
• If you have all your sites hosted on one server like a VPS, consider setting up a webdav service so you can drag and drop files to your server, just a like a network drive rather than having to use FTP.