[chef] How best to reprepresent a hosted site in Chef?

[Dmitry V'yal < >]

Hello,

thanks to anyone, with your advices finally I've finished preparations 
and I've started cooking my server.

I described some basic stuff like web server configuration till now.

Now I have more questions. It's main function is serving about two 
dozens of sites we developed and currently supporting. Adding a new site 
is multi-step process. Script I wrote adds an user, setups a repository, 
creates a database, adds a config for webserver and log analysis system.

There is currently no way to remove the site and no central repository 
where the current configuration is stored. Also, there is a separate 
host used for backups, it makes commits through ssh on a regular basis 
and fetches them from the server. It's scripts need tweaking after 
adding a new site too.

I feel all this chaos can be greatly reduced with Chef. I hope, at 
least. But I'm not sure, how best to represent "the site" in terms of 
chef. For me it looks like some kind of resource having it's attributes 
like domain name, ip, username, passwords(?). Is it feasible to write an 
extension to Chef? I've read it's quite easy.

But also site can be described in terms of operations needed to set it 
up, like add this user, create this file, put that file there and so on. 
This way I may use Chef as is, but such imperative descriptions give me 
an uncomfortable feeling.

I'd like to hear some thoughts from the community regarding my situation 
and pros and conses of various approaches possible.

Best wishes,
Dmitry