 You had a good chance to stretch your legs and get a snack or something during the break. We are going to in this session be talking a little bit more in depth about something that we touched on earlier, which is the WordPress domains portal. Earlier we talked about how the three systems work together and how WordPress acts as a sort of wrapper delivery system for those cPanel accounts, those basically collections of tools that domains makes available to users. And this time we're going to just go a little bit more into detail about how that system works and what it means for your users. Is there anything I'm missing before we get started? Let's do it. Cool. Let's just pop that in. So this is the front page WordPress for State University. Maybe familiar. We talked about it earlier. This is our basically playground for if you wanted to just see what it would be like to be a domain of one's own user. This front page is what we sort of have out of the box for any given domain of one's own institution. You can always customize it later, and I'll talk about that in a second, but you can brand the home page to sort of fit with your institution and fit with what you think is right. So you can see up here we have State University and this picture in the background here that would be replaced by something that really shows off your institution, particularly picturesque building, something that you want to have on display. WordPress for domain of one's own institutions comes with single sign-on. So your users would go here, get started, get taken through the single sign-on portal and into the request form or the account creation form depending on how things are set up. Again, we'll touch on that in a little bit. We don't have SSO enabled for State University because by its nature there's not one institution, one single sign-on system that we can sync it with. That said, SSO will be in place for you guys. This is just a place that has all of these different resources, home page, link to the dashboard, et cetera. And I'm going to switch quickly into a different tab that is also sort of the same tab. You see? If you're familiar with WordPress, then you may notice that the one difference here is the top menu basically. And if you are a user on any given WordPress site, no matter what your sort of account permissions, your account role is, you'll have that top menu bar just so happens that this is the admin account. So there's lots and lots of permissions and lots and lots of power. So what happens here, I'm just now going to take you sort of behind the scenes into the dashboard. Let's pop right in. And if you're familiar with WordPress, this is going to look really similar to you. It says three failed login attempts today. That was us definitely just testing security and not messing up logging into our own site. It's fine. Don't worry about it. I wouldn't have to do that. It's super. Exactly. Demonstration purposes only. Yep. We're going to just make our way down the left hand menu, I think, a bit at a time. And the first thing that we're going to touch on is this item called State University. So I talked about the theme a little bit before. And we use WordPress as a wrapper to deliver that cPanel, that control panel to the users. And what that means is that there's some custom code in the theme that brings in the cPanel and combines it with that WordPress branding and SSO enabled page to make everything available to your users very quickly and easily. And that custom code makes up a custom theme that we call, in this case, State University in other cases, it would be whatever your institution's name is. And this tab is where you can manage the layout and styling and theme of the home page just to quickly go through these, not even really. You can change color scheme, things like that. So you can really change it up and make it your own. And if you want to, you can even switch the theme. WordPress has options for customization, but don't use them because custom code will break and then things won't work. What kinds of options for customization should you be avoiding? There's a little menu here called customize. If you click into it, any change that you make in the resulting menu is going to mess with things. Yeah, it's better just to stick with those options that are available right within the viewer there to make changes to the custom child theme. If you wanted to use a different theme, which a lot of our schools do, that is possible, just work with us because we have to take all of that custom code that's currently sitting in that child theme and put it into a new theme that you want to use. That does take a little bit of time just to work out, make sure all of the wires are working and connecting the way that they need to be. What did Mr. Halloran say in The Shining? There ain't nothing in Room 237, so stay out. Hear me? Stay out. Unless, of course, you want to do something like UNF'ed with their gorgeous domain. So you can do different things. We would just ask that you reach out to us as you're planning on changing that theme and changing around how things look and we can work with you to make sure nothing breaks in the interim. I'd like to point out that if you're familiar with WordPress, you know that the theme does certain things, but the page content is usually not much to do with the theme. So there's a lot you can do sort of below the navigation area, just using WordPress's built-in tools or like Elementor. So there's a lot of schools that will do customizations that isn't changing anything about the theme but is simply just changing the layout of the home page and that goes a long way too for a lot of people. So next we're going to hop on down to plugins, I think. And similarly to themes, there's a bunch of plugins in here and they all do something. So if they're active, they're probably active for a reason. So that's another one where we recommend that you talk to us before you make any changes deactivate or remove any plugins like that. There's a couple of here, there's all the plugins here doing something. There's a couple that are doing particularly heavy lifting. In your institution, there will be a single sign-on plugin. We don't have that because as I said single sign-on isn't part of this, but we do have the WordPress social login which let's, it functions as our single sign-on alternative where you can sign on with Facebook and Google and things like that. We also have removed dashboard access which, if you're familiar with WordPress, users can have different sort of tiers of roles and the tier of their role let's gives them certain permissions but all of those roles can sign into a version of the backend that's stripped down depending on the tier with admins having the most options. Remove dashboard access means that instead of doing that, they'll see something else when they log in which is really what we want because what we want is for them to log in and see their account and their cPanel. They don't need to go behind the scenes for WordPress because that's not really why they're here. And removing dashboard access is just a way to make that happen. Yeah I really love that plugin and I think another one that I wanted to share and I'm taking over screen sharing here is the user switching plugin which is one of my favorites actually. It comes to life in the users tab so that's where we're going to jump to next and I'm going to kind of make my screen just a little bigger there. As you can see we're working in the demo school so your user list is probably going to look a little bit different than mine and that's okay but there's a couple things going on here that make domain that makes domain of one's own function the way that it does. So that switch to plugin that user switching plugin you can see that in action when you hover over each account I can switch to a user's profile and actually mask as that user. So that's super cool I'll show you how that works in a second but I want to take a minute and point to this user list in general. This is going to be a record of anyone who has authenticated or interacted with your domain of one's own homepage at any point. So that could mean that they have logged in with single sign-on but didn't actually sign up for an account. That could also mean that they have actually requested an account or they're waiting for it to be approved. It could also mean that you know they have a cPanel account and they've actually signed up and created that account start to finish. So the way that we distinguish those different phases is actually through WordPress roles. Okay so in a standard setup the subscriber role is always going to be associated with someone who has logged in but doesn't yet have an account. So maybe they signed in saw the sign-up form and said I'll do this later or maybe they're waiting for that account to be approved so they can create it. So there's somewhere in that process. The author role is going to be associated with someone who has access to that sign-up form or who actually has a cPanel account. So a couple ways we can do this. Some schools like to have a request form where they're requesting an account and we're using Carlton as an example here because I love this this request form where you can capture a little bit more data. You know who are you why do you want to use this you know what are you hoping to set up etc. It allows you to capture a little more data as you are helping folks getting on boarded into domain of one's own. So that's one way you can do that in which case we would make sure that everyone by default is logging in and getting a subscriber role. So we handle that with single sign-on settings where we say anybody who logs in associate them by default with this role subscriber equals request form right. If you are ready to approve someone to get an account. So let's say I'm going to use Jim Groom as an example. Let's say Jim. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Let's say Jim is a subscriber. I could quickly change him to that subscriber role and now when I search him again if I switched into Jim's account I would see that interest form okay. So if the process for approving someone is really just associating them back with that author role. So I'm going to switch Jim from subscriber to author just by checking that box and we can make that a little bigger there. There you go. I'm going to set him back to author and I'll click change and now when I search Jim again I can now switch into Jim's account here. So there's that user switching plugin being super helpful. I was originally logged in as admin now I'm logged in as Jim Groom and I have the ability to see that sign-up form so that's exactly what you want. So the other side of domains you know you can have that process to have an interest form or request an account or you can just push all of your users to see the sign-up form by default. So I'm going to sign up for a domain called ilovedomains.stateu.org and I'm going to click check. This is an opportunity where your users can choose their own domain or you can say no you know we really want to associate everyone with their first and last name as their domain so we're just going to sort of give them a domain. That's possible too. It's completely up to you all. We just configure that early on with infrastructure but we can also just change that at any point too. And that's based on single sign on data. Yeah single sign on data we can say just grab first and last name of the metadata push it together in the in the sub domain and call it a day. This is also a great opportunity space where we could embed a terms of service or acceptable use policy if that's of interest. So just know that that's possible and I also like that users can see this just to make sure there's no typos or anything. We're going to click continue and again just reviewing because this is a demo school you know you're seeing a lot of demo data here. Again another opportunity where we could customize and add in that acceptable use form if that's something that you were interested in. And I'm going to complete sign-up and this is the one time where the end user sees WHMCS. We talked about this earlier WHMCS is what's automatically provisioning cPanel in the background and it's going to do that by redirecting and counting down from 10. Once that countdown completes you're going to see your page refresh and the magic happens. And so you can see while I was talking here we've got our WordPress wrapper at the top literally this whole section up here so you're branding for a domain of one's own and all of your support documentation and everything exists there but now we have cPanel embedded so it's really WordPress wrapping cPanel. And just to kind of bring it back full circle here remember that I was logged in as admin okay so this becomes a super powerful tool when you as the administrator are needing to work with students and faculty to help them with their accounts. So now just as quickly as I jumped into Jim's account I can jump back out into admin and I really like that because I think you don't have to be sitting next to someone to help troubleshoot with them. So when you get those tweet link support requests that say my site's broken or it stopped working you know we we can see exactly what the user is seeing. So we'll talk about supporting domains and common troubleshooting tips in later sessions but I find that 90% of the work that you're doing to administer and support domains can be done straight in this dashboard. In fact we recommend it that way because we'll show later on in WHM for example you'll have the ability to access cPanel accounts in different ways but logging in as the user to see the cPanel as they see it will always be the best way forward to you know truly understand that relationship. So we've talked kind of from a bird's eye view of how these systems work together. This is obviously an introduction into the first system WordPress. We'll talk a little bit about cPanel and then in future sessions we'll look at the other two systems that are doing work here to support domains as well. So Pilot do you want to maybe give a brief overview of cPanel and what's possible? Sure thing sorry I muted because there was a truck backing up in the background. Yeah so I can take over sharing just give me and I can also have a screen. Okay that would be perfect then. Okay so the first thing let's do that is just looking at I always it always catches my eye first because it's red and red is scary and you look at it and you go oh no it's very it's fine. Basically what happens is that WHMCS provisions the account and then it takes a second for the system that we use to provision certificates to catch up and say oh there's a new account gotta go put a certificate on that. So in the time in between making the account and getting the certificate provision which takes like 30 seconds to a minute yeah maybe not not quite yet but in that time it'll say the certificate is not set up it'll get set up it'll be okay and then it'll turn green and it won't be scary anymore. So there's a couple of things that you can do with cPanel I like to say that sort of the further down you go the more niche advanced tools the tools are but right up at the top you get common applications you get the domain management and you get your file manager. So let's start in the file manager I think because the file manager is a fun place to see what your site looks like when you haven't done anything to it yet. It's also a great place to see what your site looks like when you have done things to it but we'll start there. Public HTML is the folder that we're going to look at. Public HTML governs what your primary domain looks like. So if you were to go to ilovedomains.state.org whatever would be displayed is what is in this directory. There's nothing there right now we just made the site. But if you hop back out and if you go into the cPanel Lauren we can install WordPress and then take a look at what file manager looks like after you install it. Yeah and so this is the one click installer installatron where you can go through there's a bunch of settings options. You pick the domain that you want to install it on because you can set up subdomains. We recommend that you always set up on HTTPS instead of HTTP because that'll apply that safety certificate. If you forget if your users don't do it you can change it later. There's options. You're not locked in to HTTP just because you accidentally missed that step. And if you scroll through you see all the settings there's the most recent version there's your language there's the template. This is also sorry I was just going to say this is also you can see here a little introduction to what we'll talk about later which is something called site templates or slots. So you can actually template versions of applications and then in the process of installing say you know I actually I don't want a clean version I want something that my professor has created for a course or something. So anyway we'll jump into that more later but for now we will do a clean WordPress install. And notice the domains community site yeah we can now mention that. So if you scroll through you find a bunch of different settings license agreement updates things like that and by default your users have the option to pick radio buttons whatever options they want. You can strip this down you can say no you have to automatically update you have to install whatever the newest version of WordPress is and that's totally fine schools schools definitely do that but we don't want to limit your users on your behalf that that's not cool. Going through there's the username the password admin email website title tagline all of that and here's a the you can customize it right here you can also edit it later in WordPress you're not logged in. I also like pointing out these credentials here which are specific to the application so some people don't like cPanel and they just want to log in with their application that's also possible too so you could bypass single sign on bypass you know cPanel entirely and just say this is the only time I'm going to be in here from here on out I'm just going to log into my WordPress dashboard separately so that is something I will say Installatron makes it pretty simple to log in without knowing the credentials for WordPress other applications you do need to know these credentials but WordPress is pretty spectacular and that you don't have to remember these password this username and password so much so that we actually generate you know unmemorable username and admin username that doesn't really make a lot of sense just even for security purposes because something like admin is sought after you know for malicious hacks so you know to use something like this just makes things a bit more secure yeah and there's also options later for if you do forget your username or password you don't end up getting locked out of your site it's particularly important for those applications where you do have to keep track WordPress has some special features that mean that that's not entirely necessary but you can always go back in and edit those from Installatron using some of the Installatron settings editing tools of course they're settings editing tools and this view is one of my favorites where Installatron is automatically installing those folders and files creating the database and just doing it all for you so you don't have to do that manually which is pretty cool like magic yeah and so now if you go to ilovedomains.stateu.org where there was previously absolutely nothing there now there's a whole WordPress site exactly it's amazing oh i was just going to say and now if we go back to that file manager where we started off in the beginning you know we pop back into public html oh i'm not going to rename it i'm just going to pop back in it you can see that it's been populated with those WordPress folders and files so you could pop into wp content go to the plugins folder and see what plugins were automatically installed and activated when you clicked one button which i think is super cool and i remember as a student seeing this for the first time and just feeling like a lightbulb went off trying you know trying to unpack how the web worked on the back end this was just a really cool moment for me so yeah it's i don't know i said magic before i stand by that it's like pretty magic um and it's magic that consists of files and directories which makes it a little bit more accessible files and directories are my favorite type of magic yeah i will go ahead oh i was just going to say that on on the topic of files and directories we do have some schools that use domain of one's own for their beginning web design programming classes like that for writing html css and javascript and so that's part of what the file manager is for is you can have students write those files and then go in pop them right in set up the site all by themselves uh wordpress is super popular but part of the point of this is the flexibility and you can build your whole site from absolute scratch if you want yeah and i'm also just kind of flipping through here the amount of applications that we offer by default but this is also a good point to talk about how you you can customize cPanel um cPanel is cool and that there's so much here but it can also feel overwhelming for beginner users and so later today when we talk about whm which is the cPanel server we'll talk about how you can customize cPanel to be a little more digestible for your community um and you can actually create multiple versions of cPanel too so if you want to have a really stripped down version for beginners that everyone gets by default and then maybe a more advanced cPanel or a faculty cPanel with more storage access to more applications you know some of the advanced functions of cPanel that's also possible too um i will say one of the first things to usually go is that email section schools don't like that and that's okay so we can take it out but the point here is that reclaim is not going to take it out by default we want you to have the keys to the kingdom as cPanel comes and it's up to you all to determine how you want to tweak and brand cPanel for your community i'm looking around here too just a couple of other things we've got um the disk usage on the side here which is a you know a great opportunity to talk quickly about um you know the amount of disk space that a user gets by default yeah um so what this means is i think here it's about 500 megabytes but any uh a server will come with a certain amount of storage for 250 gigabytes by default um and that gets uh allotted to different accounts as they're made um or rather a maximum quota is allotted to different accounts yeah and so good oh sorry i didn't mean to interrupt you i was gonna say i just um you know we usually give about a gig to two gigs per per user by default but that can obviously be tweaked on a end user basis you know individual users or at scale per cPanel accounts um but that's about where we should wrap maybe for now um if you have any questions about WordPress please leave them in discord and we can respond to you there we'll also have time for q and a later today as well but hopefully this gives you a nice overview of what's possible in WordPress um as kind of your main homepage first step into domain of one's own have we missed anything i think we're pretty good i think that was quite good and just reinforcing WordPress plugins and themes within there all have a reason for being and one of the things is you'll be using that the switching and the users to possibly do a lot of the management in WordPress and sometimes that gets forgotten is that you can take care of a lot in WordPress without ever going into WHM or WHMCS so don't take that for granted awesome