Are there any decent open-source multi-tenant CMS's out there?

Question

We're looking for a CMS that we can use as the basis for a new product we're rolling out.

As it's principally a content based thing, we need to base everything on a CMS, but there's a few things we need:

• As we're supporting tens - hundreds of users, we ideally need a multi-tenant CMS (single shared code base), that can support different designs per site
• As we're selling in functionality, we need something that will let us deploy a new 'module' and switch it on/off on a per site basis
• We prefer stuff that is open source (PHP or Rails, that sort of thing)

Before I consider building something, is there anything out there that's any good?

Answer 1

Now I am biased, but dotCMS 1.9 is a flexible open source solution (java) that was designed to make running tens or hundreds of sites within a single instance easy. You can create site "templates" and use them again and again as needed them. Sites can share content, assets and templates, or not share anything depending on how you set them up. Users can have access to manage one site or many sites - their views into the management tool are limited by their permissions (as you'd expect). Again, I obviously am biased as I work for the company, but this is exactly the problem that dotCMS 1.9 was designed to solve.