 the system refresh overview of the three components that make up the main of one's own. And I have the distinct pleasure of being joined by Reclaim's newest member, Amanda Schmidt. Amanda, how the hell are you? And welcome. Hi, thank you. I'm super thrilled to be here. I was not very long ago in the seats that our attendees are in. So now being on the other side of things is pretty crazy. Yeah, actually, I didn't formally introduce you. So why don't you tell a little bit about your background? I assume people they'll hear too much about me soon enough. So what about you? How did you come to Reclaim? What's your history and all that? Yeah, so I actually came to Reclaim hosting as the Instructional Support Specialist back at the end of June. I came from the State University of New York, SUNY, at Geneseo. I worked there as the Digital Humanities and Learning Coordinator for the Center for Digital Learning. And before and during that position, I worked quite closely with Ed Beck at SUNY Onianta to implement the SUNY's version of Domain of One Zone for the SUNY, you know, whole SUNY system. So 64 different campuses, not all quite using it yet, but definitely making a lot of headway, growing every day. And what really drew me to that kind of work with Ed was when I started teaching students in my role as a professional support staff member, when I started working closely with students, realizing that they are called digital natives, I don't know if any of you have heard that term before, but they're always, everyone always says, oh, Gen Z, digital natives, they understand it. And then realizing, oh, no, they actually don't understand it. They are natives in the way that they are very comfortable with interfaces. But they don't really, at least at my school, this liberal arts school that didn't have a computer science program, it was pretty common to find students who didn't know how to save files, didn't know how to navigate their computers at all outside of the downloads folder. And so a lot of the work that I was doing at Geneseo was getting students comfortable with that space. And Geneseo's mission, part of it, is to create responsible citizens. And I think that the digital part of that needs to be given more attention. And so being able to create digital citizens is exactly what Domain of One's Own is able to help everyone kind of promote at their schools. So that is really what drove me to start working more closely with Reclaim. It's interesting too, because part of that logic that you're talking about, it started Reclaim, no, Domain of One's Own, which then kind of spun into Reclaim Hosting, but it started at UMW, a small liberal arts public school like Geneseo, in Fredericksburg, Virginia. And in 2012, so 10 years ago, literally, we actually started giving faculty, students, and staff web hosting that they could then not only install WordPress, which many of them did, but other tools that were emerging like Omega, Scaler, and actually using just HTML or PHP, some learning some basic kind of, how would we say, fluencies around building on the web and understanding how stuff like DNS, databases, et cetera, work. And I still think, for me, that's a lot of what excites me. But like you said earlier, everyone will have a different use case for Domain of One's Own. That's kind of what I like about it. It doesn't have to be the same at any one school and how you think about it and how you brand it and frame it is really like part of that agency, right? Like that's part of what you're doing and probably why you're here is to think through. So one of the things we did start, and I'll let you talk a little bit about it, but the first of the holy, I call it the holy trinity. I hope I'm not being sacrilegious, but there are three systems that make up Domain of One's Own. And Lauren created this, I'm gonna try and bring it up. She created this nice kind of space where you can see all of these. And she actually did it at a Domain of One's Own workshop when we were at Skidmore. I think it was in 2018. But it's actually as part of your Domain of One's Own, instance, this page comes and after your URL, you can do slash d-o-o-o-dash-admin and you will get this. And I like this because it's a really nice kind of one-stop shop for all the different systems that are associated with your Domain of One's Own. I'm using State U here, that will be the demo site, but these not only list WordPress, WHMCS and WHM, all of which we'll get into briefly and then spend the rest of the day getting into in detail, but it also links to docs, forums and service data. So all very useful data. This is a useful page to kind of quickly at a glance see all the things that incorporate Domain of One's Own. So let's start with the first system, in some ways the portal WordPress. Amanda, do you wanna take us through that and look at WordPress and I'll do the driving? Yeah, totally. So if we can just pop on into WordPress, this will be kind of like your home base, your landing page, not just for you, but for your students and faculty who are using this system. As you can see here, this might look very, very similar to what you have right now, but should be some differences like you should have your university's logo up there, some beautiful picture of your university scenery. All of this is to say that we are really encouraging you to promote your branding here. You won't see, you know, reclaim hosting scattered all over this page. We really want it to be about you. And so this is where you can kind of make this your own within some limits. We don't give you full control over all of the editorial aspects that you can do within WordPress, which many of you may be very familiar with and comfortable doing because one of the reasons that we use WordPress as this wrapper is because it is so familiar to a lot of people and, you know, because we love WordPress as well. Exactly, and I think it's useful and we'll get into WordPress in more detail. So really consider this a very, you know, 30,000 feet view, but not only are many people familiar with WordPress, but because WordPress has such a robust open source community, we're also able to leverage plugins and themes, particularly for single sign-on integration, et cetera, and basically bring in C-Panel instances as an embedded page within the WordPress portal, which actually is how the whole system is working. So let's give them an example, Amanda. I'm gonna actually go to users. I'm gonna search users and people can sign up and actually do some of this. And there's this one pop-up that just won't go away, that I'm very annoying, but anyway. Classic WordPress. Yes, exactly, by me. It didn't used to be like that if I wanna go there. But anyway, if I use this tool and we'll talk about it again, so don't worry too much about it, where I switched to a user, it's called Switch2, I can now see what a user will see when they log in to my Domain and One's own instance, in this case, StateU. So I am actually here at this page within WordPress, and this is the moment at which I pick a name and create a C-Panel account. And why I stop here for a second is there's a 10-second window, right? And I'm gonna do this process and then talk a little bit about what's happening in that 10 seconds. It's basically WordPress handing off the automation and creation of a C-Panel account to a different part of the trinity. This is the second part, so we'll talk about it in a second. But in the interim, I'm gonna pick a domain name, and I'm gonna say domains for life, can I do that? So that's what I'm gonna say, and we'll see if it's available. If that domain is available, it will say great, StateU Domain Domains for Life, it will allow you to double check there to see if you've made any typos, which I do a lot. If you did, you can start over. If you didn't, you can continue. And in this 10 seconds, right? And it's gonna also give you, and usually the email it gives you is the default email for the school, not personal information for the faculty or staff or student, and I'll complete the sign up. And it will have a 10-second countdown. And during this countdown, what's happening is WordPress, via an API call, is reaching out to a tool called WHMCS. WHMCS is a kind of middleware that sits on top of the C-Panel server and by default automatically creates a C-Panel account. So that process is where WordPress is pushing into a different system called WHMCS. There's a bit to know about WHMCS. It really only does work for that 10 seconds, but in that 10 seconds, it records a lot of data about who signed up in terms of who, what their domain is, what their password is, et cetera. But also, it is something you can refer back to to see what those active accounts are, et cetera. So again, we'll get into this more detail, but WHMCS is literally that middleware between the two. And if I go back to my handy dandy tool, which I love so, is the, this is one of the coolest things. And I love that it just came out of a brainstorm, this kind of, because I use this all the time when I'm trying to figure out between. So if we talked about WordPress, right, Amanda, you talked about WordPress, talked about WHMCS, the final piece of the puzzle, WHM, good old WHM. Good old WHM. I usually refer to WHM as the thing you paid for, right? When you're doing a domain of one's own, in fact, what you want is C-Panel web hosting. I mean, we've said it before, I'll say it again, we're kind of not reinventing the wheel here. C-Panel web hosting has been around for near on 20 years. I started it using it first in 2003, and I think it's older than that. I'm pretty sure it is. But regardless, C-Panel is essentially giving you a lamp environment for hosting, which would allow you to run applications like WordPress, Omega, et cetera. And that is all running on the final piece of the trinity, WHM, it's often referred to as the C-Panel server. And this is the box that we create that has all the different accounts that your community members are gonna create. So let's take a quick look at that, because one of the things I can show you quickly is here is the C-Panel account that I created, Domains for Life. If I go into WHM, which is this infrastructure, excuse me, and if I list on accounts, what will happen is I can find this reclaim for Life account. Domains for Life? Oh, sorry, thank you. I can find if I could spell and remember, and I think Amanda underestimated how bad my memory is, but now she knows. So Domains for Life.stateu.org, that is right here. So that account I created now is within the C-Panel server, and I can do certain things from C-Panel here that allow me to modify this account. But one of the things Amanda and I were talking about as we got ready for this is one of the things to remember as admins is there is a link between three systems. There's WordPress, the portal where you log in through. There's WHMCS, which is creating a bridge, and then that bridge is leading you to the C-Panel account, which is embedded within a WordPress page, which is what you see when you look at this. That's the C-Panel account that's embedded within the WordPress, and you can see that it's embedded because you have the WordPress kind of admin bar at the top of that page. And if there's ever a problem with that connection, that's sometimes when we'll be talking you through support ticket, because it can be linked, but there might be a kind of a break in the link between these three systems. We've made single sign-on pretty easy. We integrate with your university's SSO, and it's probably what makes Domain of OneZone unique is that we've allowed it to be easy to automate and create a C-Panel instance. Again, C-Panel's not new, but providing it at scale, automated, simply for folks to kind of allow folks to get the space and then support many versus having to do it manually for each person. That's really the kind of, I think the quote-unquote innovation of Domain of OneZone and how we make some of that agency, Amanda, that you talked about, possible at scale for admins like you. Absolutely. As an admin, it depends. Admins at different schools are going to be active in different places in these systems. For me, I wasn't really in WHM a lot, but I did find it pretty helpful for understanding our Domain of OneZone. It's kind of like the universe. Everything in there you do is universal. And everything that you see is universal. So you can see in there what is available to all of your C-Panel users. And so I know we'll be talking a little bit later today about incorporating templates, enabling and disabling certain applications. All of that is technically happening from the server side. So it's something that is good to be aware of and you'll definitely learn some more about it as we go on today. But it's also, as Jim said, what you're paying us for. It's kind of the monster truck behind the system. But I also like the point you made talking about the fact is as an admin where you helped run this at SUNY Geneseo, like you didn't have to be in the WHM server on the regular or you didn't have to grapple with WHMCS on the regular. Some admins take to it more and they have a more hands-on approach. We also can take care of a lot of this through WordPress. So I would say anywhere from 80 to 85% of what you would have to do as an admin could be managed through that WordPress interface and we'll deal with that in the next session. We'll dig deep into the portal and the various plugins themes and how you would manage that. But I think of this as a process of your comfort level where you wanna focus your attention and what you wanna know about. But this domain of one's own 101 is really kind of focused on giving you a broad overview. This session being the broadest, right? What are the three systems? How do they link or interrelate? And really it's WordPress's portal, WHMCS as bridge that automates the creation of C-Panel accounts. And then by default, C-Panel is embedded within that WordPress page. So there's also not only a Trinity but like a virtuous cycle where one reaches out to the other and then it comes in. And it really is a process to make this easier for your community without any intervention to create these sites, right? How you manage that, how you build that, how you think about kind of creating a kind of a logic behind your system. I think one of the things we are talking more about now that we have this ed tech team and I think it's been very constructive is, when you go at domain of one's own, how do you do that intentionally? Like what is gonna be the logic behind your project and who does it serve? And I think thinking through those questions over the course of the next two days will be really useful and we would love to hear about them because the more kind of understandable and defined your project is, the more we can help you address and focus it that way. So please bring those questions, please prepare for interaction and letting us know. And obviously we'll be doing these videos but we'll also be discoursing in Discord. So questions could be answered there on the fly. And we really do look forward to working with you over the next two days to think through what does it mean as an admin to run a domain of one's own project at your school? Anything I forgot, Amanda? Nope, I will just reiterate that this is about your project and your school and we're here to learn from each other, get some inspiration but I'm really looking forward to seeing all of the uniqueness that exists in this group and the unique needs that each person is gonna have for their own projects. So it's gonna be great. That's right. And as we say at Reclaim Hosting, yeah, or is it for life? I forget what catchphrase we're going with, right? All right, see you in a bit.