I am about to change my VPS and intend to use Plesk instead of CPanel.
All the tutorials on this site that mention a control panel are about CPanel and not Plesk.

Can JMS still set up a front-end purchased subdomain if the control panel is Plesk and not CPanel? - it would need to create the sub-domain and copy the master template to it.

This is fairly urgent as I am sitting with my hand above the 'buy now' option for the new VPS.....

You can use Plesk but very frequently, you may encounter problem in the Plesk configuration to allow sharing the files and folder, permission or ownership error.

We didn't published any Plesk doc because we never encounter a stable method to configure plesk. Each time you have to modify the default plesk setup provided by the hosting company.

This is not the case with cPanel that does not have any issue in terms of permission and that does not require to adjust the Plesk installation.

Our experience show a ratio of 3 in the management of Plesk.
When you can do something in 1 hour on cPanel, you may need 3 hours on Plesk to do the same thing.

We encounter very few Plesk environment without any issue but this exists and in this case is equivalent to cPanel.

This post is almost a year old. The version of the manual I just downloaded does have some notes for setting up JMS Multi Sites in Plesk. But I'm not understanding the recommended file structure and I'm a bit confused by the language in the manual.

General Goals:

1. Master site database
2. Individual databases for each site
3. Separate site files for each site (so they can be exported if a site leaves).
4. Each slave site should be accessed by it's own domain name: www.slave1.com; www.slave2.com, etc.

Questions:

1. On page 22 you recommend we "deploy the website into a directory 'domains'. So that each domain will be beside each other..." And in the chart below, you list the following:

URL: www.domain.com
Directory Location: [HOME]/domains/domain.com/public_html

But in Plesk, my server path is:
/var/www/vhosts/domain.com/httpdocs

And then below that server path chart you say that on Plesk, "'public_html' is replaced by 'httpdocs'". So are you saying that on Plesk I should be placing my slave.com domains inside the "vhosts" directory? Or do I need to create a "domains" directory inside "httpdocs"?

RE: Plesk and owner/group file issues, to my knowledge, this can be overcome by running PHP as a FastCGI module, instead of as an Apache Module.

But, on to my problem...

This post is almost a year old. The version of the manual I just downloaded does have some notes for setting up JMS Multi Sites in Plesk. But I'm not understanding the recommended file structure and I'm a bit confused by the language in the manual.

General Goals:

1. Master site database
2. Individual databases for each site
3. Separate site files for each site (so they can be exported if a site leaves).
4. Each slave site should be accessed by it's own domain name: www.slave1.com; www.slave2.com, etc.

Questions:

1. On page 22 you recommend we "deploy the website into a directory 'domains'. So that each domain will be beside each other..." And in the chart below, you list the following:

URL: www.domain.com
Directory Location: [HOME]/domains/domain.com/public_html

But in Plesk, my server path is:
/var/www/vhosts/domain.com/httpdocs

And then below that server path chart you say that on Plesk, "'public_html' is replaced by 'httpdocs'". So are you saying that on Plesk I should be placing my slave.com domains inside the "vhosts" directory? Or do I need to create a "domains" directory inside "httpdocs"?

If you have a recent Plesk version, what you need to do to solve the problem of ownser ship is:

Create the domains under a Plesk subscription

Go in Subscription
- Select the website (domain) in which you want to add supplementary domains using the same owner.
- Inside the "website and domain" perform a "add new domain"

Wtih this procedure this should solve the problem of files and folder ownership.

After that, if you use the standard JMS rules, verify that in the JMS settings menu, you have the public field = "/httpdocs" that is the generic convention used in Plesk.

When you create the new domain into plesk, ensure that the document root correspond to "domains/YOURDOMAON/httpdocs"

Yes, creating a Subscription in Plesk does assign the subscription "owner" and "group" to all directories and files, instead of root, which causes the problems.

As for the pathing, I'll use the paths that I mentioned above, with "domains" in your example corresponding to "vhosts" in mine.

Thanks