 Hello. Welcome back from the break. So Jim talked a little bit before about the three systems that make up domains and how they work together. In this session, we're going to be taking a little bit of a deeper dive into WordPress. Later on, we'll do a similar thing for WHMCS and for WHM. So I'm going to share my screen and just walk you through the first steps of what it looks like, what your resources as an admin will be in backend, and generally how that should work for you. Lauren, you can jump in at any point if I start making mistakes. But let's get started. So this is the page that Jim showed you before, the domain of one's own landing page for state you admins. Your domain of one's own instance should have a similar thing. This is based on a plot, which is just a small template that makes it pretty easy to set up pretty quick out of the box, ready to go. And it's got the links, as Jim showed you, it's got a couple more resources. And to go to WordPress, you would hop over here and then click log in. Now I've actually already done this just to make it quick and easy, so I don't have to go through all that fuss. So here's what it will look like for a user. They will come to this homepage. This is sort of our out of the box way that this will look. It's got, you can see branding. It's got this little logo, which is really nice. It's just allows you to make it a little more personalized to your institution. So when things are getting set up, it won't be this background. It'll be something that you send in something that reflects your campus, your institution's personality, whatever you want it to look like. So this site WordPress is what we use as a wrapper to deliver the C panel, the control panel that has all of the tools in a domain of one's own user toolbox to do whatever they want. We talked to earlier a bit about how domain of one's own can be a really personal experience depending on what you want to accomplish, depending on why you signed up, depending on just the purpose that your institution wants to provide. But a user coming to this site for the first time will see functionally this. They'll click get started. This will take them to the single sign-on portal and that'll get them set up in the system for the first time. It'll provision them with a WordPress user account and it'll set them up in WHMCS as just a person who's logged in. I'm actually not going to click get started because this site, which is our sample site, doesn't have SSO integrated because the idea is that you even could log in, become a user, test things out and make sure that they're working and see what it's like actually, not make sure that they're working but what it would be like to be a user at your institution. Can't do that with SSO because we don't have that for you for your email. It just wouldn't work. So instead of doing that, this get started button would take you to a place to log in, place to set up an account with your email, Google, however you want to do it. Yeah, I was going to say really quick. So StateU is a demo domain of one's own school that anyone has access to as a testing playground. So you could go up to stateu.org right now and follow along with us if you wanted to and click get started and sign up for a demo account or you can just follow along on your own home page branding site, you know, but that getting started is for each school will look a bit different depending on what single sign on you have. For us, it's going to link out to like Google or Facebook or something where you can log in. But then also we want to have a place behind the scenes to log in as well. So that said, I'm going to hop in to what it would look like from the admin perspective. It's almost exactly the same. The only thing that's different is if you log in as an admin as we've done over here, here's the little reclaim admin tab. You would see this top menu and this top menu is probably familiar to you. If you've ever worked in WordPress before depending on whether or not you're an admin, you'll have a couple more options in the menu. We are an admin. We got lots of power. So this is just what it would look like for you and we're going to hop into the dashboard which is the back end of WordPress where you can do whatever you want. It says to failed login attempts today. That is us failing to log in. Not in preparation. That is us security. We're penetration testing this system. Because we know it's being pulled back. Exactly. So this should look again if you're familiar with WordPress, pretty standard. The dashboard just shows you a couple of different tools and resources. Things that you might want to know at a glance as it says right over here. But I'm going to quickly go through the left hand menu just a couple of things that are pretty standard and pretty useful. So over here, let's see. We're going to start with the theme, I think. I think that's where I want to start. So I talked earlier about how we're using WordPress as a wrapper to deliver that control panel, that toolbox for your users. And the way that we've done that is we've created a custom theme that brings in the branding that we talked about earlier as well as the account that is living on the server and delivers it all as one to your user when they sign in to WordPress. We're doing that, as I said, with a child theme that were in your menu would say something about your institution. Here, this is StateU. So that sort of branding. But this is where you would control all of the styling and special switching up of the look in general. If you've worked with WordPress, you know that WordPress has its own native tools to customize the look. Because of the custom code that goes into bringing the WordPress and the cPanel together, we have a special place to do that styling because if you use WordPress' built-in tools, it won't know what to do with the cPanel part and it will break. That's your warning. So you can go through it. Don't change your theme. We'll get to that in a second. Go ahead, Lauren. Oh, I was just going to say. I mean, it is possible to change the look and feel of your homepage. In fact, a lot of our domain schools have done that. So you can use obviously the customization options here in the child theme to do that. Or if you're looking for an entirely different look and feel and you want to use a different theme completely, it's possible. It just requires us to take that custom code, which we have embedded in the child theme and put it in whatever theme you want to use. So for instance, UNF is a great example. They have built out a custom homepage. Maybe someone could add it to the Discord chat now. But if you're working with a different theme, just let us know and we can work with you to get that custom code embedded. Just a little bit of a process on our end. Just as Tyler was saying, just don't go in and change it on your own because then obviously everything would break because that custom code would go away. So just help us help you. It's important to note too that there's a lot you can do without changing the actual theme, right? Like everything below the navigation is possible to edit with the WordPress tools or using something like Elementor as well. So there's a lot of schools that do that too. Yes. That is, let me see. I have notes. I have a whole outline here in case I missed something. But I think next we've gone over the theme. We're going to just keep going all the way down. We're going to hop into plugins. So the plugins are part of where the magic happens, part of what brings everything all together. There's of course the SSO. Well, I said there would be an SSO plugin. I lied to you because earlier I told you about why we don't have SSO installed. You will have SSO installed. It will be here. We also have a couple of other plugins that just use, yes, instead of SSO, we have down here at the bottom WordPress social login that lets you log in with Facebook, Google, like Lauren was talking about. We also have a couple of other plugins that just make things work together. The one that I want to talk about right now is Remove Dashboard Access. What that means is that by default in a WordPress site, no matter what your role is, no matter what permissions you would have, no matter what you would have the power to do, when you log in, you can go to a version of the dashboard and that version will be stripped down depending on how much power the administrators want you to have, but it'll still be there. That's really not what we're going for with this because what you want a user to log in and see is not the WordPress dashboard, it's their cPanel dashboard. You want them to log in and right away see the tools that they have. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah. Remove Dashboard Access is part of the toolkit that we use to just make sure that the embed is working. Absolutely. I think that's a good, something else to just note about plugins in general. Same kind of rule of thumb for themes as plugins. If it's installed and activated, there's probably a good reason why. Just keep that in mind before you go through and uninstall the short code plugin or limit logins, for example. Those all have really important roles. Alternatively, if there's a plugin that you want to add for an additional function, for instance, I think Georgetown and a couple of other schools have a plugin that allows them to have additional fields in the user list, which we're going to go to in a second. If there's a plugin that you want to install, just chat with us first to make sure that there's no conflict with Domain of One Zone, and we can work with you to figure out the best function to bring those in. The other plugin that I wanted to mention here is User Switching. This is probably my favorite part of the main WordPress homepage, and I'll show you how it works. It's actually in the user list. If you hover over, again, this is a demo school, so your users will look a bit different here. If you hover over any account, you'll see a switch to button. That is really cool as an admin, because right now you can see at the top, I'm logged in as admin for this domain's homepage, but I could switch into any end user account, which means I can mask as the user and see exactly what they see. So when troubleshooting, it becomes much easier to work, because you don't have to be sitting next to the user to do that. You could just switch into their account, see what they're seeing, and then help them accordingly. The other thing I want to mention about this user list while we're here is that each entry does not necessarily mean that each person has a C-panel account. In fact, it means that each one of these people has, at bare minimum, logged in with single sign-on. Regardless of account or not, if someone has logged in and authenticated with single sign-on, that record is going to be here. The way that we differentiate between logging in versus having an actual account is through WordPress roles. WordPress roles become really important when navigating in the homepage. Because I'm in a demo school, it's a bit harder to see the difference between subscriber versus author. So I'll try to share some visuals in Discord as well. But subscriber is associated with someone who has logged in but doesn't yet have an account. This could also mean if you have the request form up, if you want folks to request a C-panel account instead of just automatically being able to sign up for one, that subscriber role is going to associate them with that request form, where they're somewhere in the process of still needing to request an account or they've requested an account and they're waiting on it to be approved. So the way that you would approve someone to get an account is by switching their role from subscriber to author. I'm going to use a test account here called gemgroom. I was just going to quickly hop in and say that we don't have the request form activated on this particular site. We can't demonstrate it for you. For all the same reasons, we can't show you a single sign-on. Yeah. We'll make sure to have visuals in the Discord too just to make that clear. But it's very easy to have the request form. It's just associated with single sign-on. So we can say, all right, anybody who logs in automatically associate them with a subscriber role, which is going to mean request form. Anybody who logs in automatically associate them with the author role, which means sign-up form or cPanel. So you can easily flip that switch. So for instance, if you want to have the request form on 90% of the time, but for this one week, you're running a domains camp workshop or something and you know that everybody logging in is going to automatically be approved, we can quickly turn that request form off. So let's say gemgroom has requested an account we want to give him permission to sign up for an account. So we're going to change his role. Right now it's set as author, but if you ever needed to change that role for someone, let me see if I can zoom in here a little bit. You would check their user list and you could click change role from subscriber to author and then you would click change. So that's kind of how we're doing that. That's how we're handling it there. So if gem was set to subscriber, you know, I could change him to author just like that and click change since he already has the ability to see a sign up form. I'm going to show you what that looks like because I can actually switch into Jim's account here. So switching in, I'm going to log in as Jim and you can see at the top, how do you gemgroom? So, but I could switch back to an admin role if I wanted to. So again, I can mask it as that end user, sign up as the user if I wanted to. Obviously domain of one's own is meant to be a bit self-service. So, you know, it's cool to give your end users a chance to sign up on their own and let them choose their own domain name, but every domain school has a slightly different workflow for signing up. So this part of the session is really just to show you those options. So let's say I was going to sign up for Ilovedomains.stateu.org. On brand. Right, exactly. So this would be your project URL. Some schools say we don't want our users to sign up for a domain. We just want them to be given one based off of single sign on credentials. That's possible too, you know. So instead of being I love instead of them having the option to say I love domains, they would hop in and immediately say and the request form would functionally say congratulations. The domain that you get is JimGroom.stateu.org. Right, exactly. So it can vary however you want to handle it. In this review page, it's a great opportunity. If you wanted to add in a terms of service, we can embed that as a little checkbox down here or an acceptable use policy that we can link out to or even embed text here. So that is possible. A lot of our schools will take advantage of that too. And then I'm going to click continue. I've reviewed and of course some of this stuff will, this definitely will not be here. It's a bit of a demo school. So you can see there's other stuff here. The main point that you would see is this space down here with complete sign up. So once I click that, it's actually going to start counting down from 10 and this is that one place where the end user sees WHMCS where WHMCS is automatically provisioning the C panel in the background and it counts down from 10 and then that your window is going to refresh and we should see that C panel embedded with the WordPress wrapper. So you can see at the top here, we've got that WordPress wrapper, all of your links for documentation or help support community showcase site. That all lives right here as planned. But now we've got that C panel embedded. We also have additional links for user information and things like that, but that is the proper workflow. And to remember, we were actually logged in as admin. So I can now switch back to admin if I wanted to and go about the rest of my day. So it's kind of a cool look into how that switch user can be helpful. I also want to note just very quickly because it's in my, right in my line of sight, there's a bit in the right hand menu that says self-signed certificate in red and people see that sometimes and that looks really scary. Give it 30 seconds to a minute and it'll get a proper certificate. Yeah, that happens automatically in the background. It just takes a few minutes for the system to say, oh, we've got a new domain here. We've got a secure, you know, so that's what's happening there. But C panel is obviously has a ton happening here. There's a lot going on. We'll cover a little bit today. But just know that later on in the session, later on today, we'll get into more troubleshooting tips as well. So there will be time to focus more on C panel. We just really want to show you in this session the WordPress to C panel relationship. Yeah, and we're also, I think going to talk a little bit about just, hey, you're a first time user. This is the most common use case that we have. This is what it sort of looks like under the hood versus when you're installing WordPress versus after you've installed WordPress. Ta-da, look what it did just for you using that automatic installer. So, let me just hop in and share my screen as well if I can just do that. So this is basically the same thing as what Lauren was just showing you. You'll note that over here, it's been a couple of minutes. The certificate has been issued. It's in green now, which means everything is okay. That's what green means every time. So if I scroll down here, we're going to hop. I generally think of C panel as the further down you go, the more not niche necessarily the tools get, but the less and less you might want, you might be interested in using them. But file manager, top tier, I love it. It's great. We're going to hop into file manager real quick and you'll see under the hood, this is just, it's just a file directory system. You may recognize something like it from your computer. The public HTML folder is the sort of one to really look at because public HTML is the main domain. So if you were to navigate to, I love domains.state you.org, you would see what we have as the default HTML CSS, just what the default site would look like before you've installed anything in there. And this is a great point to go back to when we were talking in an earlier session about how you can really pop open the hood of your domain and open up this index.html file and just start writing, right? So it can be very old school if you want it to be. You've got those files and directories right there in your public HTML. But of course, that's not always preferred, right? Some people want to install an application and C-Panel makes that pretty simple. Some single click. Some schools like to use Domain of One Zone for their programming and web design classes. I think Emerson does that sometimes. And that's where the ability to write in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and put it right to the file manager is really useful. But a lot of folks like WordPress. Yeah. And here's a look at what that index of I love domains.state you.org looks like. Without anything. It's an open public HTML ready to be written to. Awesome. Just going to hop back. So this is the install atron page for WordPress. This is the quick and easy one click installer. You'll note right now there are no applications installed. No backups taken because there's nothing to take a backup of. So we're just going to hit install this application. Says we want to install on the domain. I love domains.state you.org. We don't actually want to do that because this is HTTP. We want to go with HTTPS just to make sure that that certificate is always loading. Everything's nice and secure. And you can change that after the fact. If you forget, it's nice that you have that ability right up front too. Yes, exactly. Lauren's right. We do sometimes get users who say, oh, no, I've is this irreparable? No, it's not irreparable. We can fix it for you. It's fine. You can fix it yourself. You have the tools. That's the whole point. I'm just scrolling down. It says the newest version is 5.9.3. We really recommend you use the newest version. Language. Give me a clean template install. Accept the ULA. And it's worth noting there too, I will say that with all of these settings and installatron, you as the admin have the ability to choose what settings you even provide as an option to end users. So if you say, no, we don't want users to install an out-of-date version of WordPress because we don't want things to be, you know, insecure in that or, you know, not as secure in that way. You know, we want to keep things up to code to the best of our ability. So when choosing WordPress options or, you know, automatic updates, all of those settings, we have the ability to tweak in WHM, which we will talk about in a later session. Yeah. So if you just scroll down, you see automatic updates, automatic updates for plugins and themes, automatic update backup, which I think is very useful. It automatically generates a username and password for you. I'm not even going to touch those. I don't know what the password is. It'll be fine. You'll see. The admin email is by default just the user email that's associated with the account, the website title. There's some default stuff in there just to make sure. Limit login attempts is the security multi-site. No, we're not going to do that right now. We're just going to hit install. One click installer. Super easy. You get the chance to customize your settings. But if you don't want to, it's right there. But it is interesting to note that you can install a multi-site right from Installatron, but just keep in mind if you're into that, it's only sub directories, not subdomains. Yeah, but that checkbox is so cool. Just by a simple checkbox, you can enable a multi-site, which is awesome. Yeah. It's powerful. I also love this window because you can see all of those files being automatically installed in C-Panel. I remember as a student seeing that for the first time was super cool. Yep. I'm very quickly going to hop back into File Manager before I show you a secret powerful trick. And we are going to just refresh to make sure that everything's taken. And you remember before, the public HTML was blank. It was empty. There was nothing there. There's lots of things there. And this is the power of Installatron is it can really just put together all of these things. You don't have to mess around with how do I install it myself. Installatron will take care of the whole thing for you. Yeah. I don't know. Just seeing that again, seeing that as a student for the first time, being able to pop into the plugins folder and see how that was set up on the backend. I don't know if you've ever had had that exposure before. And so it was really cool just to see how websites work. And I think that that's such a cool skill to have. And so the fact that domains makes this possible, even though it's so simple is really neat. And the index goes to that hello world WordPress you're up and running. Exactly. You now have a publishing platform. It's awesome. So just kind of coming full circle again. Within the session, we've talked about WordPress, which is your main portal for domain of one zone. It's where you can brand and offer support resources for domain of one zone. It's where you as the admin have the ability to go in and see user accounts, you know, see how users are logging in and interacting with domains. It's where we handle request form. It's where we talk about single sign on. And it's also how you can log into end user accounts to manage C panel accounts, for example. So this is a bit of an overview of WordPress. I think 90% of the work that you're going to do is going to be in this space. Yeah. Let's see. I do want to very quickly bounce back and because I sort of assume we might rerecord this. Just hop in and say earlier when I said I'm not even going to look at the username and password. That's because there's a little magic link here. If I click it, it'll take me right into the dashboard. What's up? Oh, I was going to say you weren't sharing. Yeah. Shoot. Well, there we go. Let's do that again. Go ahead, Taylor. No, that's fine. It's good. Okay. The little magic link is right here. And just like that, you are in the dashboard. Yeah. Good to go. Beautiful. And WordPress is the only one in the application that does do that. That is actually very, very important. But in the event that if we pretend that this is an Omeka site or something like that and you totally forget there is the ability to go in and scroll down, edit the username and password so that you can make it something that you actually do remember. So you're not going to get locked out just in case that does happen to you. Cool. So in the next section, we're going to talk about the other two systems of domains, WHM and WHM CS. You have that to look forward to. In the meantime, if you have any questions, feel free to leave them in Discord and we will get to you there as well. Yep. Awesome. We will see you in the next session.