 So we're back again. This is common troubleshooting tips for domains. And to be honest, this is gonna be kind of a jam-packed session here in terms of little topics we're gonna cover. So yeah, put your seatbelts on, you may need it. We're gonna talk about, basically, we'll show a couple of things that are real common problems that may happen with a site or an account, or just like talk about a couple of administrative things that you may want to know about. All of the things I'm gonna show are covered in documentation as well. And they're linked on the session page. So I'm going to actually be referencing that quite a bit. And so you'll be able to kind of see that as I go here. But exactly, here, let me get my screen up here. I'm a little bit disorganized at this point. So I just want to mention, if you click on the Common Troubleshooting Tips for Domains session in the headless, in the workshop site, that's gonna have all the documentation I'm talking about. And I'm sure we'll put a lot of it in Discord as well. So the first thing I kind of wanted to start with is a doc we have called Common Troubleshooting Fixes. So a few things to mention in here is password, IP addresses, in case you have folks working with DNS, and cache clearing. These are like the first things anytime any of your users are having trouble with the site to make sure that these things are good. Is their browser cache the issue? Is their IP address the issue? In case it's like DNS related, someone can link the DNS flowchart. Was the problem DNS? No, I don't know if anyone knows what I'm talking about, but it's always DNS flowchart. And sometimes that's only gonna be relevant for your users, mostly if they're using top-level domains or if they're mapping a top-level domain into their account. And then can they log in and do they have access to that? So a couple of things, and I'm gonna try to do almost all of this from the WordPress front-end because I think most of the time that's the easiest way to get in to help your users, especially in the case of you've got a user who maybe wants to do this themselves. Like you can send them some instructions in certain cases, that's maybe what you want to do. So I actually have three StateU accounts and I have to pick the right one here because two of them are expired. So if you're in your WordPress front-end, you can switch to the user that needs help. And once you're in their C-Panel, you'll note that their IP address, that was one of the things I mentioned, right? Their IP address is always gonna be on the right side of the C-Panel. So that's always available to you there. That's the IP of the server that their account is on. If they're pointing like an A record or doing some DNS stuff, that's what they need. The password. So there's a couple different types of passwords in the domain of one zone that they may need. Of course, if we're talking about the user can't go to your main domain site, so like in this case, StateU.org, and they can't log in there, that's likely single sign-on if your institution is using that and most are. At that point, whatever change password process your institutional accounts use would be the thing. But if they're needing to do something like they can't log into their WordPress site with credentials, they can always do that stuff from the My Apps tab in Installatron, right? So all they have to do is go to My Apps and they can click on the Configuration button and they can set a password right from there and hit Update, and that will change a WordPress password. The other type of password that comes up really often is a cPanel password, and that's probably less often for most domain of one's own users, but that is something that you actually would have to change in WHMCS for the user. The only types of users who are probably needing a cPanel password is if they're using SFTP to manually move files into their account with a client like Transmitter Cyberdoctor, something like that. So that is available to you in WHMCS. So this is one of the few things that I will have to do from WHMCS. So if I look for my account on state U and I click on the person in the account, I can just go to the Products and Services tab and the password is actually in plain text here. So we'll wait for this site to get hacked now that everyone can see the password here. But yeah, I could change the password, and then all you need to do is use the Change Password Module command to make that change. So the other... So kind of going down the list, those are some common things. Oh, I forgot about cleaning your cache. So you probably are familiar with browser cache if you've done any helping folks with website stuff. But I wanted to point out a couple things, and I think we may need to update this, but refreshyourcache.com, this is a good resource, but I'm not sure how up-to-date this is anymore. Yeah, Google Chrome 27 is super old. So I will say if you need a resource to point users to, so they know how to change, clear their browser cache, we at Reclaim Hosting have our own documentation on that, and it goes over several different browsers. I would link to this if I were you. We've got one for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Opera, and Brave. And I would use this because this is, at least for me when I work on support tickets, this is something I end up sending users pretty often. So there's a pretty good chance that we will be updating this for our own purposes before you would ever need to have your own version. So that's the main three things you want to make sure are set before you do anything more drastic. As far as other things that you may need to do administratively, a big one is changing the user's primary domain. And again, we have this documented, and it's pretty simple, but the first thing you want to need to make sure before you do any domain changes is that the domain isn't already used on the server. If it is, it'll give you an error when you're following these instructions. It's not the end of the world, it's just the change won't go through. So you want to make sure that no one, you can search on this on WHMCS, or you just try to visit it in the web browser. That'd be a pretty good indication it's not really being used. But the big one is a user wants to change their subdomain on a domain of one's own. Once you're sure that's not being used, you just go to their WHMCS profile, and you can change the domain in the panel there. The tricky thing with this is you also need to make this change in WHM. Unfortunately, this is one of those things that doesn't sync. So what you're doing is you're going into your WHM, and in my case, I'll go in and state you here, and log in. I'm going to go to List Accounts. Normally, you can actually search in the newer WHM from there too. I've gotten kind of used to that. Oh, it's because I'm looking for... List Accounts. Yeah. Well, I need to find the actual username. List Accounts is always the answer. In WHM it is, you know it. Yeah, List Accounts is everything, honestly. Okay, so once you're in here, you modify the account, and you would be able to change the primary domain up here. So you type in the new primary domain, and then you would save it. And it's important to note that you're... When you're doing the second step here in WHMCS, that that's really for your record keeping purposes so that you don't have conflicting data. If you do this in WHMCS, it's not going to force that change on WHM. Yeah, that's a great point. You have to change them in both places, because WHMCS is what's helping create that bridge between WordPress and the server, right? So having that in sync is really important. So after those changes are made in both places, you can click Change Password there, that module command, just to make sure everything is syncing up. One question that comes up here is also, okay, I'm changing the domain name, so can I change the cPanel username to match? That's easy if your cPanel is empty. Sure, go for it. If you've got stuff on your cPanel account and you try to change that cPanel username, you're going to break everything because that cPanel username is associated with database prefixes for all of your site installs. So it's purely back-end stuff that you... So the answer is no, please don't change it, because it would be very manual to go into every database and fix that. So we just say, change the project domain name, leave the cPanel username as is. Yeah, leave the gun, take the cannolis. And I think the... I mean, back to a point you made, the point before then, just as a kind of reassurance here and a reaffirmation, understanding how WHMCS links to WHM conceptually is a really big... If you're a starting admin, it's a really big, kind of like hopefully a-ha moment or light bulb to understand by you changing it in WHM, but then you're syncing with it with WHMCS because that's the place where all record keeping and accounting happens. So it's almost like you begin to understand through this process of changing a primary domain how those two systems relate. And I really believe that's a conceptual understanding that will help you down the road. So if you have questions about that, reach out to us, but it's a really important point to reinforce as you're getting familiar with how these things work together. Awesome. So a couple of the things that come up quite often as problems and I think probably the most common one I see happen is folks that see that dreaded site URL in WordPress and they want to change their domain name and so they go into WordPress and change it there because there's a setting called WordPress address and site address. Frankly, I have no idea why this is in the user interface for WordPress because anyone that is actually making that change on purpose probably could do it in a text file in a database because you almost never would need to change it in the...anyway. So what happens is someone will go, I have TaylorJaden.com but I want TaylorJaden.coffee and they don't really understand that they have to go register that domain name and all that stuff or maybe it's a subdomain thing and they're just trying to move to a different subdomain. They are conflating this field here in WordPress with them being able to change that and the problem is WordPress really only wants to know this so that it knows the base URL of the site and can do its WordPress eMagic, right? So if they change this here, what will happen is the WordPress site will no longer load if they change it to wherever the site is not installed. So how do you fix it? Well, you have to go fix it in the database. It's not too hard but it is something you have to go into the database to do. So if I go in here and I totally did a bad job of prepping this here so I'm going to quick flash install a WordPress site here on my state.org demo account but what we'll do is we're going to go into PHP MyAdmin and we can use the database tables in there to fix this. And the reason that you have to go into the database directly is because when you fill out that settings field with something else and you change it in two places in the WordPress dashboard, the WordPress dashboard breaks so you can't go back in there and change it in the same place. You have to go kind of behind the scenes into the database directly. You lock yourself out essentially but often we get tickets from students who are like or just people who have installed WordPress who are like, hey, I changed my site and it's no longer working. Right. And while Taylor's working here you can see the field in the settings place where he's making that change but you'll notice he's changing it in two places which means we're going to have to fix it in two places but that's kind of the painful part of this is not only are you going to break the front end of your site but you're actually going to break the backend dashboard as well. So that's usually where you get a support request. Hey, I think I broke something. I can't even get back in to fix it. What's up? And so this is that handy trick where, okay, we're going to go back into the dashboard and or to the database I should say and fix that. It's nice too because as Em brought it up in a previous session, you get a little glimpse into database management with PHP My Admin as well which is always a good tool if you haven't explored it yet to see. Yeah. So this is a common kind of result here. So what you'll see is that there's there's actually some stuff loading and this is mostly a browser cache related that's even doing this but if I go try and log into the dashboard it's going to try to redirect me to a domain that doesn't even exist. So we have to fix this. So to do this we go into PHP My Admin and again you can do this right from the user's C panel so you would go to your WordPress site for your domains project switch user to that person and then you can go so that you're in their C panel and you can go to PHP My Admin from here and I pretty much always use this search bar but it is in the databases section I always just type in PHP My Admin but you can also find it in databases so once I click on that it's going to bring me over there and it's really important that you are looking at the correct database or database table if they have multiple different sites or it could be WordPress sites it could be Omega sites or whatever if they have multiple sites and you see multiple entries in the left sidebar here you're going to want to make sure you're looking at the right one. You can easily see that in Installatron settings if you go to the Installatron page and you go to the I think it's the advanced tab of the application that you're looking at. Yeah so if you view and edit the details you can see it in files and tables and it will give you the well that's the files but at the bottom it will show you the name of the database right in here I think advanced also shows it but this is often where I will find it. Actually from that window I believe if you scroll up you can click directly on one of those links and it should take you into PHP My Admin so it's pretty slick. You're right so if you click on the folder up here that would go into the file manager I didn't even know that and this one here will go right to the database which is awesome. It's beautiful. That's cool. That's super awesome. So the first thing we want to do is go to WP Options that's the table in the database we want to look at and we need to find the key for the site URL in home so you can see here those are both tailor.state.u.co so I'm going to edit those I could be wrong but note that sometimes the ordering of this is different you may not always find these at the top or am I just remembering that? I think at the point that we wrote the documentation one field was on page one second field was on page two I think they have made changes where they've pushed both fields to the top which is kind of nice but the actual fields that you'll need to change site URL I believe is one and the second one is home those just be on the lookout for those. Yeah you can always they will always be called site URL so that's the real thing you're looking for so I already did site URL but before I do home here I figure I should probably zoom in a little bit so this is a little bit more readable so once you go to a key and I'm going to go back before I change this so once you just go to the row that has site URL in home click edit and then you'll fix the URL to what it was before note that in my opinion I better off to fix it back to the old URL and then ask them about where they would like to move their site because that's probably a domain name change or a subdomain change like I just showed before or maybe some other process The subdirectory is another one too where I think you know while you're making this change I think when you're installing WordPress for the first time in installatron it will recommend a slash blog subdirectory to try and remove the slash blog and it still breaks things in my opinion you're better off just fixing the site so it works by putting the URLs back to what they should be and then using the installatron clone tool to move it wherever they like it to be to move it somewhere else in the cpanel directory or if you're using an entirely different domain name and you need to change that at the cpanel level that's where you would change it in WHM CS and WHM kind of where we started the session it's also good to note and point out too that like your options here are numerous in terms of where sites are like as you mentioned you can add in a new subdomain to an existing account but you can also move account to ownership to a different person and change that primary domain name or subdomain name so there's a lot of options and if you're confused about what may be the best way to do something I would put in a ticket to support and say here's the situation we want to do this what path would you recommend I also blogged about site organization and thinking about am I using subdomain, sub directory should I use one cpanel or separate cpanels and just thinking about scenarios where each of those makes sense and I think it's going to vary by user it's going to vary by institution I'll link to that okay so I've set the while you're looking for that I've set the URL correctly here and I'm going to need to go to the bottom of the page and hit go it's super important I've definitely forgotten that you won't save anything this isn't google docs until you tell it to go because you're changing it's go because you're like running sql code but it's really weird I wish it was save but I understand their thought process I guess are we going to test it does it blend let's yeah does it blend let's see so if I go to tailor.stateu.org whoops let's make a new page it's funny because as you're doing this one of the things there you go that I believe let me just confirm this but one of the things that Jackie brought up was if I have access to my host file I can just change it to the mistaken domain and then change it and then you know get it out of my house I was like you're doing that on your host file you are free and easy you know what's going on that's awesome so good for you host file modifications are for the real ones out there I use them all the time because we have to when you're doing migrations you want to be able to see before you actually change the DNS but all host files are doing is changing your DNS locally so you can see what it will look like before you actually change the DNS but DNS becomes a very powerful tool we'll talk about it in another session but it is definitely worth understanding some of that even though it is complex and never predictable I wouldn't be 100% sure I think in WordPress's case on domain of one's own that totally would work that way but there are some applications that are very picky about when they will and will not work with host file host file changes will work what I'm saying is the application may not always load properly with the host file change especially if you have things like non-relative URLs and things like that there are some weird cases where that doesn't work perfectly and of course the fact that it would only work on your computer yeah okay so we are almost out of time because I am bad at pacing things so some of these things we can get to later in another Q&A section if we have time but again they're all documented here and I kind of briefly breeze through them here just so people are aware of what we're even talking about this is brought up earlier when you have a page that the application will not load at all or you get an error of 500 you should use the file manager go to where the application is installed so in my case for tailor.stateu.org that's the main site at the like the root of that account so that would be in public HTML but if I made a subdomain call it coffee.stateu.org coffee is on the brain that would be in a different folder that would be at coffee.stateu.org you should see an error log if it's a WordPress site and you can open that error log up right in the file manager and scroll to the bottom of it to find the most recent stuff and you should be able to see probably error references often it's a plugin or a theme that's bad if I can't even load WordPress and the main thing you're going to do there is you're going to go in the file manager and rename the folder we have a big guide on that but basically you just you will go to the individual plugins path and we have this documented here as an example for this Google Calendar events plugin in this case and you just rename the folder and again this is also the kind of thing where if you're at this level of troubleshooting and you're not sure what to do definitely feel free to reach out we can help you and show you how you would deal with that next time the last thing I want to mention is JetBackup and just that that is also always available to users and that's right in their cPanel you can do file backups or database backups or the entire account often times it's kind of nice to restore only the things that you want to restore and start there but if you're not sure or it's multiple sites that are messed up the full account backups are also available to you right in there so with that I'm trying to think I'm still trying to recover from the speed of that session so I got to look at our schedule here so the next session is at 235 it's supporting and administrating domains long term so we're going to take a few minute break here and then we'll meet you all over there is there anything else I think that's good that's everything sweet see you soon