Joomla is a powerful open source product which is very attractive if you want to avoid coding a site from the bottom up. JMS appears to be the most comprehensive multi-site offering. I am happy that this is a commercial product as long as the support is there.

But a few people have asked how this is priced. I haven't seen an answer. I suspect many others have asked themselves the same question and gone away. Or signed up because they are not paying the bill.

Before I start using such complex code, which requires working out what the manual actually means and taking various decisions prior to starting work, I need to know how much it will cost to deploy.

I have seen quotes of 1.5EUR per site but what is the quota unit. 25, 100, 1000??? There is a big difference in starting with 25 sites costing 37.5EUR and having to pay 1500EUR. And then what about the components, modules and plugins? Are these chargeable individually or by number of sites or what? Let alone which components, modules and plugins actually work with JMS.

It is not at all clear!

Can there be produced somewhere a clear, simple table that contains the price in whatever currency against quota for the basic product and also for the various components, modules and plugins, whether they work without modification, with modification and if so is there a quota for those as well. And what about test sites? ie ones that are not visible? Or sites on different servers?

The attraction of JMS appears to be the reduction in maintenance. But the alternative may be a set of symlinks on the Joomla architecture itself with completely different databases as I have root access to the server. Or build multiple sites another way....

Even Microsoft does this. Please let us know. It can't be that complex and must be built into some php somewhere to get the charging right.

The pricing is very simple.
Beside each product in the catalog, you have a price excluding taxes.
ie. for JMS Multisites that is the core application, you can install and register the product an unlimiated number of times for the price of the product.
You can also create unlimited number of website from the backend as explained in the product detail. You can also propose a free website creation from the front-end .
The only case where you may have to buy website quota is when you sale the website creation from the front-end and that you want to execute external plugin like the Bridge for VirtueMart or your own specific plugin. Only in this case you have to buy additional website quota. Otherwise this is free.
The case that you mention is the one that consissts in proposing to your customer a billable service like a "web hosting" for your customer.
This is not the most frequently use of JMS Multisites. In most general cases, you don't need to buy website quota when you create the slave site yourself and therefore this is free.
You also have plenty of tutorial video that explain several cases and also explain the case when the additional website quota is required.
www.jms2win.com/tutorial

All the prices are provided in EUR. If you want to have prices in other currencies with the current conversion rate that is applicable by your credit card company or paypal then you can use a currency converted like yahoo currency converter or other.

We do not sale in other currency than EUR. So we can not provide you a table with different currency price.
finance.yahoo.com/currency-converter

If you want to have the list of products with their prices, you can go in "Joomla Extension" menu.
www.jms2win.com/download?page=shop.browse&category_id=1

As presented in the product detail, the list of extension defined in JMS Multisites can be accessed directly here
www.jms2win.com/component/content/article/135

Edwin

Many thanks for your very prompt response.

There are some language issues here and I really appreciate this cannot be easy. JMS has so many facilities that it is not immediately obvious which are applicable to me and which are not. I suspect that I have rather different needs to many other people - this happens to me all the time!

The best way is probably to explain what I need.

I want to set up a number of Jooma sites that, while they will be on the same server, are really completely different, run by different people for different purposes and businesses.

I have the server facilities but I want to avoid excessive maintenance time. If necessary each site can be on a different database anyway so in principal I could set up loads of independent Joomla sites but then I would have the headache of maintenance and which site had which facility etc.

I therefore need is a robust way of ensuring that Joomla can be maintained as a common architecture and that includes any extensions. In the first instance, there will only be a few sites but it may grow at least to the 100's. These will be primarily sites for business so the service will be resold.

There will be no front-end slaves - all sites would be generated in the back end or by a script (prossibly automatically generating DNS entries or at least the vhosts file).

But they would all need similar facilities - news, login/registration, blog, chat, forum, possibly wiki, public and user pages.

Most importantly they would need to be able to upload information on products and services and possibly generate a shopping cart or at least have some ecommerce like Paypal witjh Instant Payment Notification.

How does that fit? If I had VirtueCart presumably those sites which used VC would require a quota. Is that right?

Secondly, in your table of components, all are checked for Install but most are not checked for Share. I realise that there are many more Joomla! components etc, some of which may require some work to integrate.

But I am not sure what this means in my context. All these components etc can be installed in a basic Joomla environment. But does the Share mean that the facility can be used across all slave sites as if they were on a common platform - for example a shopping chain may want to use a Seminar across all their mini sites (which is checked).

As I am not interested in that as my sites will be effectively independent, the only issue would appear to be whether I can install the component. Am I right here?

The geographical area covered is the UK but we are used to working in all sorts of currencies and credit cards do their bit in supporting the ailing banking industry!

Creation 100 website is small. We have customers that have several hundres and few have several thousand of websites manage in a same Jms Multisites.

Concerning the maintenance for the update / upgrade, this is explained in the user manual chapter 8. The objective is to perform the update only once as you share the PHP code for all the websites.

Concerning the setup of the DNS and the HTTP Server, this is outside of JMS Multisites.

The slave site can only install the extension present in the master. So up to you to install blog, news, forum, wiki extension that can be re-installed in the slave site.

Concerning upload of information on products, I don’t know for which extension ‘you want to upload such information.

I don’t know VirtueCart.
Perhaps you would mean VirtueMart.

VirtueMart has limitation due to the fact that this extension save some configuration in files on the disk. This concern the payment method and the shipment configuration that are saved in file on the disk and therefore are shared between the websites

There are thousand of extension available in Joomla and we reviewed only few of them when requested by customers.
Most of the extension can be re-installed in the slave site when they are not defined in the JMS Tool. The list of extension is just provided to show which extension can be managed from the master website instead of the specific slave site.

When an extension is not marked as shared, this is because you can not share its content between slave site.
See the tutorial video 16 that show the concept of the sharing of extensions.
www.jms2win.com/tutorial#jms12x-16

Concerning the sharing, I suggest that you have a look in the tutorial video 0.a that present the concept.
Review also the tutorial video 16 that illustrat the concept of sharing applied to the users.

When you share an extension, this share all the MySQL table used by the extension.
So this share all the records.
You can not share partially an extension and you can not share some records.
The sharing of extension share all the records.

As already mentioned, you can only install extension that are currently present in the master. Remember that you share the master files and folder.
Consider the master as the repository or library website where all the extensions required by the slave site are installed.

The credit card and currencies are not related to JMS Multisites but with the eCommerce application or plugin or whatever you will use to communicate with your payment service provider.

Edwin

So:

0) Install Joomla and the JMS extension;
1) Set up a number of slave sites (ie from the back end) each with different extensions;
2) Clone these slave sites as required;
3) Add a customised Joomla theme to each cloned site;
4) Extensions listed in the JMS tool can be managed from JMS;
5) Most other extensons can be installed but they must be managed in the slave site;
6) I need to purchase a quota only if I allow front-end cloning of a site to a child site;

Is that about it? No doubt there is much more to learn.

Yes it was VirtueMart not Cart! My bad... I wanted to know how any payment system could be installed as well because some of the sites will be shops.

It seems that you have generated a valuable and very useful tool that can save a lot of time and space. I just wanted to know what the costs were and it wasn't clear to me.

All technologies have different jargon and it makes communication the most important tool. I have spent time on (minor) hacking and patching linux kernels in the past so I am not a complete idiot! Well perhaps I was because in the end it was a waste of time but interesting anyway to see how it all worked...

And please excuse my English humour and irony about the banks! Put it down to the Manchester weather!!! Or just being English anyway. We all have our crosses to bear.

YEs the point 0 to 6 are correct.

The price is the one of JMS Multisites.
www.jms2win.com/download

If the point 6 you want to sale this service, you will have to buy website quota and perhaps also need the bridge for VirtueMart.
www.jms2win.com/download?page=shop.produ...pl&product_id=33

Concerning the payment method available in VirtueMart see the VirtueMart website.
We do not provide any specific VM payment method.
If you want a specific payment method we also have developed specific merchant account that can be found on www.credit-card.be and that work with ClearPark Payment Service Provider. This "clearpark" payment method we developed is multisites compatible.

We also have billable support that you can order if you want that we setup, configure, teaching you, develop specifc things.
It can be ordered at www.jms2win.com/download?page=shop.produ...35&category_id=1

Concerning the other extension available in our website, they are probably not required as you didn't mentioned any functionalities that may require them.

So in terms of price and products, you probably need
- JMS Multisites
In case of billable website creation from the front-end, you may also need
- Bridge for VirtueMart
- Website quota