 Welcome back to Domain of One's Own 101. You got to talk to us a little earlier. Amanda and Jim went through just, I think Jim calls it the Holy Trinity. The three systems that make up Domain of One's Own, WordPress, WHMCS and WHM. Today, right now, Amanda and I are going to talk to you about the WordPress portal, which is the wrapper that we use to deliver C-Panel to Domain of One's Own users. Probably the system that you as an admin are going to be using the most just to help support your users. I'm really excited. How about you? Let's get into it. Yeah. Okay. Let's dive right in. I'm going to be sharing my screen. If you, Amanda, could just add that and we can get rolling. There we go. All right. Yeah. So this is State University. This is actually our sandbox site for people who want to sort of see what Domain of One's Own is like, get started with a trial account, what it would be like to be a user. And we're just going to be using this as a place to show off what we're doing. So you probably recognize this layout. It's our default layout for any given Domain of One's Own instance and you've got just everything you need to know right here on the front page. And this is what users are going to see when they navigate to this page for the first time. They're going to hit the Get Started button and that's going to take them through the single sign-on login process. One of the great things about Domain of One's Own and what WordPress really allows for is single sign-on integration means that users don't have to keep track of their C-panel login and password. The three systems together just take care of that. Users can sign in with single sign-on. They don't have to worry about anything but the credentials they already know about. Now we're going to hop into the admin backend, which is the area that you're going to be looking at as administrators. Just click over into here. I'm already logged in. Surprise. If you have familiarity with WordPress, which you know.do at this point, you're going to recognize this bar at the top as the I'm logged in menu, essentially. As administrators, we have these advanced options available to us. Use non-admins will have slightly fewer options. So we're just going to hop into the dashboard, as I said. And this is a pretty standard WordPress dashboard. No doubt you have all seen it. It'll look like this. On the left hand, there will be a couple of things that I want to highlight. There's the request form. There's the state university theme talking just a little bit more about themes, plug-ins, and then Amanda, I know that you wanted to talk a little bit about users and just how to interact with them, their accounts, support them, and then what the general user experience looks like, right? Perfect. Yeah. All right, so let's get started. I said that first I wanted to highlight the request form. You will note there's actually no tab for the request form. Ordinarily, there would be. So domain of one's own has the request form created by default. And what that is, is it's usually gravity forms, ninja forms, maybe. And that would be a place where first-time users who sign in through single sign-on would get taken. They can fill it out. They say, my name is this, and my email is this, and here's my plan. And they hit Submit. And that form is sent to administrators who can look at that and go, oh, perfect, great. And then approve them to go in and register, create their account. We don't have that enabled on-state university because you can have that turned off for your institution if you don't want that admin step of having to go in and approve. We didn't want to have that just for our ease of management. We have better things to do, like support you guys. So that's turned off for us. If it's turned on for you, you'll see it right here. And we'll talk a little bit about what having it turned on or turned off means for the user and for you as an admin in a minute. The next thing I wanted to talk about is the state university theme. So you just saw it in action on the home page. This is the place that you would go in order to do all of your theme options, your style out, your style, your layout, et cetera. So state university and your domain of one's own custom theme will be named something different. But they're all child themes based on the parent theme enfold. Enfold is really flexible. As I said, there's just lots and lots of options that you can use for styling in here. I don't even want to go through all the tabs because there's too many. We don't have time. But it's very flexible. As I said, you have lots of options. And that's really important because the reason that we have this child theme is as a way to deliver C-Panel to your users. So the idea being that when your users log into WordPress using single sign-on, they're taken to a WordPress page that has their C-Panel embedded into it rather than having to log into a specific area just for the C-Panel. As I said, slimming down the number of passwords you need. State university, or generally the child theme based off of Enfold, contains custom code, custom CSS, to make that embed work, which means that it's a little finicky. It's a little bit delicate. WordPress offers customization options natively. The ability to switch themes, the ability to customize how that theme looks. We encourage admins to talk to us if you want to change the overall theme. So you're not beholden to Enfold. You can switch it up if you think that that's not really working for you. If you've exhausted the limits of Enfold customization options, please come and talk to us. And we're happy to work with you to get that custom code transferred over to a new child theme based on the parent theme of your choice. That said, using the standard default word for customization options and switching themes without getting that custom code transferred over will make things break, and your users won't be able to access their C-Panels anymore. That's about it for appearance customization themes like that. And so next, we're going to hop into plugins. This is where we just talk about a lot of the things that keep the engine running. We have these plugins active. If you were to go into your account, you would see a similar, maybe a little bit different. So we don't have a single sign-on. You would have a single sign-on plugin. They'll be a little different depending on what single sign-on system your institution utilizes. But we are not an institution. We don't have single sign-on. So we have WordPress social login options, things like that. These are just keeping things generally running behind the scenes. So if you have plugins like that, they're usually activated for a reason. They're making something run. And if you look at this and you go, I think I know a better alternative. Come and talk to us. It's the same as Enfold. We're happy to work with you to get things set up in a way that complements your workflow. Just deactivating things and replacing them can cause some compatibility issues. It can cause things to break. Come and talk to us. We're happy to help figure something out. There's two plugins that I really want to highlight. Remove dashboard access and user switching. Amanda's actually going to get a little more into user switching a little deeper. But just talking about removed dashboard access quickly, WordPress has a tiered hierarchy of roles. At the top of the hierarchy are admins who get all the permissions. At the bottom of the hierarchy is a little bit of a strong way to put it, but subscribers have the fewest permissions. And sort of in the middle are authors. What dashboard access does is, by default, all tiers can log into this sort of back end. It'll be stripped down depending on how many permissions you have, but everyone can get in here. Remove dashboard access changes that. It says, if you don't have the requisite tier of permissions, rather than seeing this WordPress back end, you'll see something else. And so we have it configured so that subscribers would see the request form that I was talking about earlier. And authors would see either the registration form, if they haven't set up their account yet, or their account if they have. And we're going to take a look at what that looks like in just a second when we talk about user switching. Amanda, do you want to talk a little bit about what this plug-in's doing? Yeah. So user switching is the way that you, as an admin, are able to get into other accounts by kind of spoofing as them. This is great for troubleshooting, for testing things, and making sure that things are showing up the way they're supposed to for your students and faculty and whoever you have kind of set to a lower tier of permissions or role than you have, because you can kind of see everything. And so if something's not working for your student, you're saying, well, it looks fine to me. It could be because you have higher permissions. And so troubleshooting using a user switching kind of puts you in their shoes quite literally. So I think that in order to really get into this, we'll want to go over to the users section of the dashboard panel over there. And the first thing you'll want to do when you are trying to troubleshoot something or you're trying to edit something that has to do with a particular user is search for that user. I wonder who we can search for right now. How about Pilot? Let's search for Pilot. I'm extraordinarily searchable just because of my name. You'll know there's nobody else. Pretty much. So easy for us. So here's where you'll see lots of information about your user, not lots, but as much as we need to know. So you'll see Pilot's username, their full name, email, and most importantly, their role. So as you can see, Pilot is currently set to a subscriber role. If you had your registration form set up, which again, we don't. And so we actually only have Pilot as a subscriber as part of this demo. If you have that registration form set up, that would mean that all Pilot could see is that request form. Thank you. I'm just using the wrong terminology. But so that's all Pilot would be able to see at this point. And so once Pilot fills out that form and you go through that process that they described of looking at it and making that approval, then you would actually need to take an extra step here and go into this area, search for the user that you want to approve and effectively change their role. So Pilot, if you could demonstrate this, it requires you to select that particular user and then simply change their role to author. And then hit the change button. And then you should see if you- It's gonna make me just load it all again. Yeah, here we go. Yeah, so now you can see that that role part has changed. And so that was pretty simple, pretty quick and they should get access right away. And so at that point, if Pilot were to try and log back in on that landing page, on that get started page, then they would be brought to a new screen where they'd be able to start setting up their account. So the first thing we'll want to do is go through that process. So please switch to Pilot. So now we're moving away from the admin role specifically into Pilot. We are Pilot. Stepping into my shoes, as Amanda said. Very much stepping into Pilot's shoes here. So this is what they'll see. We're no longer on that landing page, but instead are kicked right to that dashboard section. And so since there is no dashboard to display because nothing has been set up, we're gonna go through that process. So Pilot, please select the subdomain that you would like to use on your StateU domain of one's own instance. I think Google basic, I think Google basic. I think classic. So we'll check and see if that is available. I don't know. It could be very popular. Wonderful. All right, so now Pilot can go ahead and just select continue. And so Pilot, do you want to say something about this page? Yeah, for sure. So this is just another confirmation page once you've confirmed that this is the domain that you want, the subdomain that you want. It'll say, okay, cool, great. Just to check that all your registration information is correct, is this your name as the user? And is this your address? Right now it's just saying that I live in the United States, which is true. And for your users by default, it would be the address of the institution, right? That's really all that the system needs to know. This is also sort of the, because it's the last confirmation page, this would be where you could put a link to terms of service. So sometimes institutions will say, the IT department will say, hey, we have particular rules about how users can use the hardware, the software that we're making available to them. You can embed that as the terms of service and have your users accept. Again, we're not sort of doing that in the same way that we're not doing single sign-on. That's just not part of our workflow. So if there were to be terms of service, I would click the checkbox and we can keep moving. Perfect, thank you. So we're feeling good. We're gonna complete the sign-up. And at this point, things are gonna drag a little bit and that's normal because you're gonna be sent to the screen where it's saying it's redirecting and essentially it's making all those connections that Jim and I talked about earlier, connecting all of those systems together, linking everything up and takes a little bit. And then pilots should be brought right to their C-Panel and this is something that you as an admin would also see if you were in your own account. Everyone has their C-Panel view and you can customize it how you like and pilot will go into that in just a little bit. But I did wanna just point out a few things. At the top there, you can see the current user and so that username is present there. You can see pilots domain, sub-domain that they signed up with and you'll see a scary little red area and just keep in mind that that's nothing to be concerned about at this point. It's just the SSL taking a little bit to kick in and that will be up promptly. Yeah, the system is set up to auto provision certificates. It just takes a couple of minutes to go, oh, there's a new account, let me get right on that. So that'll turn over to green in a couple of minutes. Yeah, just a little while. Great, so as you can see, now we're finally in the C-Panel and as far as being in pilot's view, you can see that up at the very top where we used to have all of these options in the upper dashboard there, we are now down to very few. And this is good because for management purposes, but also to kind of keep people focused. They don't need a ton of distractions. They just need to know what they need in order to work their C-Panel effectively. And so all the way to the left is how they would get back to that landing page or by clicking on that icon. And then in the manage your account section, that's where they'd be able to find things like FTP credentials to get into their C-Panel through FTP, SFTP. And that is what some students might wanna do. And if they don't, then they don't have to worry about it. It's kind of tucked away, but... We also get faculty who, I say often, we sometimes get faculty who want to use that just as part of their course to say, students, here's how you do it. And maybe we're making sites with HTML, upload your files this way. But it's a little bit more of a niche use case. Exactly. So I think that this would be a good opportunity for us to kind of smoothly transition into some of the basic things that you're going to be doing as a user in C-Panel. So Pilot, if you wanna start maybe taking us through some of those beginner steps. Yeah, sure. So just to go through quickly, you're likely already familiar with this workflow, but it never hurts to review. Probably the most common, the most basic first building block steps would be installing WordPress because everybody loves WordPress. So quickly we're gonna just take a look into the file manager to see what we're working with. You can see it's pretty empty right now. This is a new account. Public HTML is going to be the folder that stores the main files. So the files that are displayed when you visit the primary domain currently, piloterwin.stayu.org. You will note that public HTML is empty because as I said, this is a new account. We haven't really done anything yet. So just hopping back to where we were before, we can go up to applications, WordPress, Omega, Grav, Scalar. We actually have quite a lot of applications available. We've stripped it down a little bit, but not too too much. Maybe we haven't even stripped it down that much, but you can control which applications are made available to your users. But we're here for WordPress, front and a little to the left. Let's take a look. So all of our applications installers are run through Installatron, which is a one-click installer software that has lots and lots of options. You just saw them. We would hop over to install this application, and it'll just take us through these setting steps. The only setting that I want to customize right now is to make sure that my domain is being installed on HTTPS instead of HTTP, just to make sure that once my certificate is provisioned, it'll get hooked up with that automatically. There won't be any concerns. If your users don't do this, that's totally fine. There's a way to go into the settings later and change that. We're not gonna show it off today because it's a little more advanced and we don't necessarily have the time. We have some more things that we need to talk about, but just so you know, this is, if there's a sort of trip up here, it's totally fixable. I'm gonna keep the version default, language default, just quickly scrolling up to here. It says content, you'll note that there's three options, clean WordPress install and I'll add my own content, a template that's been made by Lauren and the domains community site. So what that just means is that if you were to want to make a template for one reason or another, when I was an admin, the studio art department wanted a portfolio template that had a couple of options that the studio art students could use to build their own portfolios. You would design the site with all of the options that you wanted users to have by default and then either in WHM, we'll talk about this a little bit later, or you could come to us and say, can you please turn this into a template? And that's something that's super easy to do. We're gonna talk a little bit about the domain's community site template in a minute. For now, it's just enough to know that it's there. We're not gonna use the templates right now. We're gonna use the clean install because you don't need that. The user license agreement, automatic updates. I'm just gonna let everything automatically update because it's generally best practices to make sure that your site is up to date for security purposes to make sure that there's no compatibility issues as other things update. We'll keep the default username and password because that's not something I need to pay attention to right now. There's also some special WordPress options for that. Default admin email, default title, default tagline. We're gonna keep all this managed setting and there's that one click install. And here we go. Yep, it's processing. I gotta go vamp for, I don't know, 30 seconds. You are probably already familiar with what it looks like to install this, but I like to think of it sort of like Amanda talked about earlier, the behind the scenes, so where you're signing up for an account, all that magic of the three systems interacting is getting your account set up. Here is the behind the scenes magic of install Tron getting everything ready. So yep, here we go. That default installation is right here. We're ready to go. And I'm just going to hop into the file system and say, let's take a look because this is a shortcut to see what public HTML looks like now. You will note, it is no longer empty, it's full. There's lots of stuff in here. There's the folders, there's the files. If I go into the folders, there's more folders and files. And just generally what this is doing is this is the thing that install Tron does rather than having to manually install the software that you want, install Tron takes care of it all for you and gets it all set up. I think that's about it for our WordPress tour. It's pretty similar for any application that you wanted to set up that your users are interested in. But that's the building block steps for any user that needs a tour, needs that help. Yeah, that's usually how we talk about that. Definitely. I think that we are running up on our time so we have just a couple more things that we want to touch on before we end here. Real briefly, I would just love it if we could talk about the domains community template. The template, yes. Yeah, just real quick, just let you know this is what Pilot was showing as an available template that we have on our instance. It's not necessarily going to show up on yours unless you ask us for it to and we can enable that for you. This community template is a community showcase template that was created by Taylor based off of what he had made while he was an admin at SNC. So Pilot can go ahead and go over to this other tab and you can see, oh, it's kind of similar to what you just saw on the last page. Lots of... A lot more populated. But a lot more populated. But it has a similar layout of pretty much what this does is it brings together all of the great and dispersed work that's happening throughout a domain of one's own program and brings them together. And so this isn't an automatic thing but it's something where if that's something that you're interested in doing, we could get this template set up for you on like a subdomain of your landing page. As you can see, it's community.night.domains for SNC. And it's something you could link off of your landing page which as you saw in the beginning is very, very basic. And so adding some more information here will really show off what is going on in your community. And if you're interested in learning more about this, we do have a community chat from a few months ago where we talked a lot about showcasing and that's kind of what inspired Taylor to make this template available to the larger domain of one's own community. If it's something you're interested in, just let us know. Yeah, exactly. I think the other thing that I really wanted to touch on was the community docs. Those are a little bit like the community showcase site in that this is something that you can install, you can make available for people. The community documentation is based on some work that was originally done at, I believe, OU which is sort of just a set of documentation that is available to your users that walks through the first steps of getting started, thinking about your account and what you wanna do with it. And then if I scroll down, you can see just the whole table of contents. That's what it's called. I'll walk you through different popular applications and basically all the steps that your users would need to know. So this is available by default on State University. You can just find it up here in the documentation tab or I mean, your users can also find it here in the documentation tab. The main thing is it doesn't go away when you're signed in. It's always available. And this is something that we encourage admins to really make your own, make it something that is relevant to your institution. So the default covers a lot of really good circumstances, but if you end up saying, oh, this particular situation is coming up a lot and I think it would be useful for users to just have a place to go so that they can see what they need to do. This is something that you can get to and edit and be able to change and customize all on your own. That's why it's community because you want it to be for your community. That's, I think most of what we wanted to cover. Amanda, how close are we to time? We are right at time. All right. In that case, that's gonna be everything for now. I think we got through pretty much all the basics. We got through slightly more than I was expecting. So thank you for joining us here. And if there's questions, we're happy to answer them in Discord. Please just put them in. Let's talk. Thank you so much for joining us and... We'll see you throughout the rest of Domains 101. Yeah, exactly. Have a good one. Bye, y'all.