CMS for multiple sites and users

CMS, content management system

[magicacaca]

A bit of a newbie question about CMS - I want to be able to give each of my customers a free site which they can choose a template for and manage the content of themselves. For example:

www.mydomain.com/customer1
www.mydomain.com/customer2
www.mydomain.com/customer3

For me (as admin) it can be the full works, but for them as users it should be as WYSIWYG as possible and limited to only a certain interface/tools.

Can anyone recommend CMSs (free or otherwise) which can do this (i.e. when they log in they only have access to their site and the templates I specify)?

Thanks,

Dave

[ergophobe]

- I've come up with a simple symlink hack that lets me run many WP installs off a single code base, but I dont' think it would be great for a true multi-user/multi-admin system (still working out some kinks).

- drupal has this built in (called a multi-site install, it can be on separate domains, subdomains or subdirs AFAIK). See [drupal.org...]

- WordpressMU would probably also work, though I haven't tried it. See [mu.wordpress.org...]

- I'm not sure if there's native support in Joomla, but you can definitely do it with a multi-site plugin: [joomla.org...]

- I've lately been pretty impressed with modX, though I haven't used it on a live site yet, but it apparently has a plugin that allows you to use subdomains to have multiple sites off one code base: [modxcms.com...]

- my wife works at a place that deploys dozens of sites on separate domains on RedDot, but it is cumbersome and prohibitively expensive (in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range from what I understand).

I suspect there are a lot of others that will do this as well.

[ergophobe]

PS If you go to [cmsmatrix.org...] you can look at hundreds of CMS and if you look at the details, it will usually tell you under "Flexibility" if the CMS supports "Multi-site Deployment".

One thing about that site - the descriptions of the CMS are often provided by the maker, so it hey have good advertising copywriters, it can sound great, so don't pay too much attention to the text part.

[reprint]

WordPress MU is designed to do exactly that for blogs but can be changed to work for multiple websites. It allows control over themes and plugins available to your clients and it is simple to use

[dbdev]

DotNetNuke does that by creating new child portals.

I did this for a pizza franchise... ie. www.mydomain.com/_local_city_names