 Hello, and welcome to our site on Installatron and Site Templates, our session on Installatron and Site Templates. I'm here with Amanda. Hi, Amanda. Hello, and my cat, Ali, is also joining us today. Yeah. You insisted, you know? You did. Yeah. He's very passionate about domain of one's own administration. That's what we love about him. So yeah, this is a quick session, but we really just kind of wanted to go through two main pieces of capability that you have access to in WHM in Installatron specifically. We're highlighting them because I think they're really handy to reminders. If you're not using these things, you might have a use for them. They're super handy, and yeah, I just think that it could benefit a lot of admin workflows potentially. Really two things. We're going to talk about Installatron's overview, which shows you every application on the server that Installatron knows about and sort of what you can do there. You can search. You can clone sites. You can move sites around. And then we're going to talk about templating and what you can do with templates. We'll make a quick WordPress template and talk about how to manage templates and what they look like and stuff like that. So Amanda, you kind of want to get us kicked off here with sort of the Installatron tools in general? Yeah, so I think that what's great about this is that you can both understand how to navigate WHM a little bit more confidently as well as realize that Installatron is actually pretty helpful sometimes. It's not always a pain in the butt. So in order to get started with what we're going to talk about, we're going to need to navigate to Installatron, which is located on the server in WHM. So Taylor is hovering right over that search bar. And the easiest way to do it is just to start typing Installatron. And then it's under that plug-ins category, Installatron's applications installer. And this is your main dashboard. And so you've got a few things at the top that are really helpful to see just right off the bat, like how many applications are on your server total, how many backups there are. And you can also see things like the Installatron version and licensing and stuff like that. So the first thing that we want to do today is learn a little bit about how to move applications around to different accounts. If we go to the My Applications tab, and let's just search for something. Taylor, do you have something? Yeah, I have a couple things on here, I believe. OK, I have one thing on here. But here's a WordPress site that I've made for. We'll take a template of it later, but we can use it for this too. Yeah, so would you say it would be a good use case for this, just as an example for what we're about to do? Sure, well, a couple things. I mean, before we even do anything, I just wanted to mention, you already said it, but this is a full list of all of the applications Installatron knows about. So you can search here. And what you're searching when you search here is this title field and stuff in the URL, basically. Doesn't have to be a complete URL, which is super handy. So as you notice, I just put my own name in there, and that came up with this here, because it's in the sub domain that I have on stateu.org. So that can be really handy right off the bat. But there's a couple things here. So you can go to the View, Edit, Detail screen, just like you can in cPanel. You can template, which we'll talk later. You could do a backup from here. But clone is super handy. And you may be familiar with cloning inside a cPanel, where it will tell you, hey, you can make a copy of this site to any of the subdomains or domains you have access to. But we can do that here as well. Yeah, so if we go ahead and click on that button, say we want to clone Taylor's WordPress site to a site to a domain that's associated with a different account. And so the way that we would do that is by going to that domain field. And instead of just seeing all of the domains that are associated with the one account that you're working in because we're working from the server level, we can see every domain in the server, which is really handy, but also a lot. So instead of having to scroll through something that some people may not realize is that this field is also a search field. So you can go ahead and just type in the domain that you wanted to be assigned to. Yeah, and for the purposes of this, let's say we're going to move it to our documentation. So I could just start typing document, and it will start auto completing, but it will start narrowing down the list. Yeah, and then it'll just fix that. And then my least favorite, yeah, is to figure out this directory thing. Normally, I think when working with this, you want to kind of ignore that. But in this case, because we have something existing there, we will want a directory. So clone test. And then you would just scroll down. And unless you have specific specifications that you need here, you can just go ahead and press that clone button. Yeah, it is worth mentioning here. I usually end up changing this after the fact. Typically, this is when I hit clone. But I think technically, if I hit let me manage these settings, you could go in here and change the email address. That's the default WordPress admin account. So if you say I'm cloning my thing here on my account over to, let's say, Amanda's account, I could go in and put Amanda's email in here. I honestly end up just doing that after the fact, usually. But technically, you could do it from here as well, so. Awesome. So it's really handy to have this all in one place as opposed to having to switch between accounts and move things more manually. You can really take advantage of this dashboard. Yeah, and so if you look on this dashboard here, you can see that the applications have gone up by one. And if you go into the task manager as Taylor just has, you can see the whole process as it is working. Yeah, and I should have mentioned here, I kind of got ahead of you. But when there's something happening on my applications, it'll say open task manager, and you can do that here. But you can also go back to this main install Tron page and go to active tasks. It's the same thing, basically. So either way. So yeah, now it's over on documentation.stateu.org slash clone dash test. And it's the same as what was the URL of my old one? So exact same thing, except I'm logged into this one, but otherwise the same thing. So super handy. Just cloning, real common thing is we have someone ask, hey, a student made this and the faculty wants to keep it or sort of maintain it because it's for maybe an organization or something. And while you could have the student's whole C panel account be sort of moved in, and that's something we talked about doing of how the idea of C panels managed by more than one person or more in person managing more than one C panel, that's great. But if you're only talking about a single website or a single application, this is a really easy way to move things between accounts. Totally. Cool. So that's the first thing. Just note that this search interface, super handy. I use this when I was in admin all the time as to get an overview of sort of what's been happening and what's been created on the server even. Sometimes I would just look at this. So the other really great thing you can do from here is you can template stuff. So I'm actually going to delete our documentation clone we just made here because I'm definitely going to forget about this site if I don't. Whoops. But and I guess worth pointing out, you can uninstall things from here as well. So I made a WordPress site in my state you account. And this is just a real bare bones WordPress quick start. This is just a WordPress site. All I did is install WordPress. I installed a single theme. I installed the go theme in this case. And I'm going to kind of dismiss any weird messages. And I didn't install any plugins in this case. I did go ahead and change post title and a page title. I made this is a page and this is a post. And then I also added it to the menu, the page to the menu. So let's say you made a template like this and it had some sort of self descriptive self guiding text for someone who's maybe new to WordPress. And maybe you're picking a theme that you think is a little bit more beginner friendly. I happen to think the go theme is pretty beginner friendly. And we're going to make this into a template. So basically that this can be an option that someone who's installing WordPress can make a site exactly like this one and start from this point. Templates can be used for all kinds of things. It could be used for a quick start like this. Maybe you've got, I've seen people who make templates that include a lot of stuff, like a bunch of recommended plugins and maybe several themes potentially. That could be a way to go. Or I've seen people make sort of specific templates for, hey, this is a template for if you're in English 301 and we're going to be starting with a writing portfolio. And here's a way to get started, basically. So you could do a more specific template like that. Templates are not just for WordPress, but we see them used most often for WordPress. So basically to make a template, you need to first have a site that you're going to template. And that part I've already done. And then we go back into Installatron here. And I can go back to my applications. And I'm going to search for it. So I'll just search for a name again. And here's that same entry. And I can just click this little star button called template. Give it a title. Let's call it WordPress Quick Start. And I can do a description. So a basic starting place for WordPress using the Go theme. And I can hit template. And this will take a few seconds for it to essentially make its own copy into its storage on the server for the template. And then it will show up available for folks to use. So we'll look at what that looks like here. If I go into my State UC panel and go try to install WordPress, yeah, let's say I want to put it right at this main, my main domain here. There's all these templates down here, including this one I just made, WordPress Quick Start. So give me a clean WordPress install. I'll add my own content. This is the default one. This is what's going to be selected by default. Now, if your domain of one's own has no templates on it right now, I think this content section won't even show up, basically. But as soon as you have a template, that's not just this clean install one. You'll have this list here. So you can see I made a template demoing how to do this. Before, we've used this a few different times for different things. But the one I just made, WordPress Quick Start, is right here. The cool thing about these templates is that even if I pick one, like I know for a fact, the true writer one I made months ago that wasn't on WordPress 6.1.1, it still will install the latest version of WordPress, which is really cool. It will install the latest version of WordPress and whatever plugins and themes that you had in posts and pages that you had. So the nice thing is you don't have to make a new one for every WordPress version. You do still want to check it out and test it maybe once or twice a year. I would say, honestly, once a year is enough for a simple one just to make sure that the plugins and themes that you've selected are still maintained and updated and compatible. But I'll use this one I just made. And you get all the same options from there. You get to pick a username, email, password, all that kind of stuff and install it. And we'll give it a quick install here. One thing I definitely need to do for these recordings is have some kind of like soundboard for installing loading music. I really bring up the production quality. I also need to fix my light bulb back there. It's blinking. I'm noticing it even in my preview and it's annoying. So it's almost done. And obviously, the larger the template, the longer it's going to take, right? So if you have 15 plugins, maybe that's a, that might be a lot to maintain. But depending on what you're trying to do, that may not be that crazy. It will take a little bit longer. But usually it's not going to take much longer than a normal WordPress install. So I can go here and there we go. I've got a template. I've got a copy, basically, of the site. The only difference is it's inserted my name. I went with the default my blog, whereas my template was called WordPress Quick Start. And other than that, it's pretty much the same thing. So as far as managing these, so if I go back to WHM here in Installatron, there's a couple of things I can do. So I can go look at the templates under applications in the sidebar here. And this is where all the templates live for Installatron. And as you can see, they're not all WordPress. No. Well, I mean, all the ones we've made are WordPress. But you can make templates for any of these applications in this list. So you can make a Nomeca template. It's not something I've done. But you can do. And I could see that being handy, especially given that Nomeca has a little bit of a learning curve if you've never used it. But it does support other things. I haven't used most of these other applications other than Nomeca in WordPress. Joomla, that's one. But most of these are pretty obscure, to be honest, other than WordPress and Nomeca. So these here will control whether they're visible or not. So if you want to keep a template around, but you don't want it to be visible for your users, and you don't want to delete it, because maybe you want to use it another time and enable it quick, you can just hide these by unchecking all of these here. So I might do that with all of these for now. And maybe I keep my WordPress quick start. And I can just hit Save. And those are still around. They're just not going to be shown when folks try to install WordPress. So if I try to make another WordPress site here on my C panel, the content field only has two options now. You also can, of course, delete one. So let me go here. I'll delete my multi-site test one that I made. Now it's gone from the server. So it's not coming back, right? There's no backups for the templates to keep that in mind, too, because, well, yeah. They're not stored in the same way as normal sites, basically. The only thing you can change after a template has been made is really the name. So if you need to go and update your template, and maybe you've got another thing you want to add or something like that, the method is just install a site using your template, make whatever changes you want, and then re-template it, basically. And you can delete the old one and rename the new one to be the same name as the old one, basically. You're replacing it, and that's how you do it. The other thing I can keep in mind, too, is this star. This is going to be the default option. So technically, you could make, say, WordPress Quickstart the default experience when someone installs WordPress. I would want to, personally, you want to think real carefully about that because I think there is some value, even though sometimes learning WordPress is a thing. I think there is some value for folks to learn from scratch, like, oh, yeah, this is what I get out of the box on a new WordPress site, and these are some changes I want to make. But that might not be aligned with what your users need and what you all can support or need to do. You may want to go, no, we really need to pick, say, a different theme or have some default content in there for folks right out of the gate, and you can do that. If I hit this WordPress Quickstart, this little button there and hit Save, now, if I try to install WordPress, let me refresh this page, my Quickstart will actually be the default option. But unless you hid the basic WordPress, that's also still an option. It won't auto-fill that one. Totally, totally. Yeah, I think if you did something, say, like mine here, where I really only made, like, I installed a theme and made some very minor changes, I don't think it's that big of a deal. I would just be a little bit leery about, like, if you're installing a bunch of plugins just so people know about them, but maybe they're deactivated, that's actually kind of a lot of junk to be installing and may actually have, like, impacts on storage on the server, because keep in mind, then every time someone installs your template, it's installing those, say, 10 plugins, whether they're using those plugins or not. So there's a trade-off, but obviously very reversible, like, if you're like, oh, we don't want to do that anymore, well, then you would just change that. So I can change it right back here, go empty content again, and now empty content or that give me a clean install is the default again. So yeah, templates are super handy. I think a lot of folks could benefit from using them. I personally would, if I was in the admin shoes at the moment at a Domain and One's own school, I would be trying to develop maybe a few templates that highlight use cases and what could be possible with WordPress, like, here's a podcasting template and here's a course blogging template, stuff like that. So it's a really cool feature that I think folks could benefit from. Anything else before we wrap up this short session, Amanda? No, I think we covered it. Cool. See you all next session. See ya.