Remotely Managing WordPress with PHP

Wordpress is the ubiquitious platform these days although I hope to change this with the inevitable release of Silk CMS in the next month or so. In my line of work, I tend to have to install many, many copies of wordpress all over the place. Wordpress makes a great platform for deploying niche sets especially and comes with hundreds of plugins that make creating these sites dirt simple. Anyone who has managed niche sites can attest that it becomes quite unwieldy to manage hundreds of websites. It helps to standardize on a common infrastructure for all of them (ie, themes, plugins, etc) however each site needs to be slightly customized to a particular niche. Plugin settings need to be tweaked, headers changed, sublines updated, etc. Uploading wordpress to each host and manually unzipping it and re-uploading everything that is non-stock is one way to go about it but it’s tedious and time consuming. If you happen to host on a hosting service that offers fantastico your job is a little easier but not by much.