How do we handle multiple customer websites and their features?

Hi,

I'm a web developer using MODX as my primary CMS for 3 years.
Having an increasing number of customers I've come to two issues.

1. I rarely upgrade MODX on customer websites. It's just hard to convince the customers. For small websites with standard extras, it should be easy to upgrade, but for larger and more complicated sites, or older versions, it can be trickier (as I'm sure you all know). So this leads me to think in terms of having ONE MODX installation serving multiple customers. Which of course raises more questions and problems. Maybe some kind of "Master MODX for the core and managers" and then "child MODX's" for the "customer specifics". Is something like this doable? Or any other solution for the problem? Maybe just Contexts and ACLs and run it all from one MODX?

2. Website features for all customers. 80% of the features of regular company sites are mostly the same. I found my self coding the same features over and over again for every new site, which is very very silly. I've realized that now. So what options do I have here to solve this? Features usually consist of both backend and frontend code. As I see it I can have my own packages/extras for features like "Frontpage slideshow", that creates the necessary template variables, chunks and snippets. Is there an other way to have "centralized" code for several sites? Github? Or to use ElementHelper extra to pull in elements from ONE central source?

How do you guys handle the two issues above?

I usually host them on a single MODX install and use ACLs in order to segregate them from each other so clients don't see anything that doesn't belong to them it can be very tricky and can become messy especially template handling when you have have 50 sites on a single install the key to keep things organized are chunks and Context Settings and make sure you install VersionX it will save you from when something goes wrong.

It was a real issue before when I used gallery since everyone could see other galleries that were not part of their site but MIGX took care of that and now the upcoming MoreGallery will make that even easier to manage.

Hope that gives you some ideas to get you started.

Good Luck.