 Welcome back. In this session, we're going to give you an overview of the various systems that comprise the made of one's own. There are several, the first of which many of you I imagine will be somewhat familiar with is WordPress. WordPress is actually the system that we're using to wrap everything up, and it might be a good pointer, so thank you, Lauren, that all of you have a page, if you go back for a second, Lauren, all of you have a page that has this domain of one's own landing page, and this will be useful actually throughout the day for you all to navigate to the various systems, if you already have an existing domain of one's own, where you can log directly into WordPress or to WHMCS or to WHM as we talk about them to get a sense of them. Stepping back into the WordPress discussion, this is actually the tool we use to actually wrap CPanel in a very clean user-friendly single sign-on enabled environment. WordPress is something that a lot of administrators are familiar with. It has a great very rich ecosystem of plugins and themes that allow us to integrate single sign-on, to hide the dashboard, to manage users in sophisticated ways. In fact, we're just leveraging the open-source community of WordPress to build the landing slash portal for the domain of one's own. We'll spend most of our time talking about WordPress and CPanel in this first session, but I do want to mention WHMCS and WHM because they are the other two systems we use, and I'll start with WHMCS. What does it stand for again? It stands for Webhost Manager Client Solution, I think. It's a mouthful, it's an acronym, but it's essentially the client manager. We'll return to that naming in the later session and we'll get it right. But it's actually exactly right what Lauren said. This is basically the client manager. This is a tool that is designed to automate the creation of CPanel accounts and to track an account for billing. We don't use billing in the way we do domain of one's own, but we do use the automation of CPanel accounts. When you see that moment and we'll point to it later on where there's a pass-off between WordPress and the CPanel server, WHMCS is actually doing its work of automating CPanel accounts. The final system is WHM, which I can confirm means Webhost Manager. There will be some questions later on, but I can confirm it now early on. It is Webhost Manager, that's what it stands for. Anyway, this is actually basically the service system you paid for when you bought a domain of one's own, or if you're thinking about buying a domain of one's own. This is actually the multi-tenant server that provides CPanel instances for up to 500 or more accounts and users. It's powerful, we'll talk in-depth about the CPanel user interface, but this is the other side of the coin, and Lauren, thanks for going to it. This is actually the WHM interface, and it has a ton of options, many of which you will not use, and we'll talk about them in some detail later on today. But this is actually the interface for managing all the various settings and accounts on a CPanel server. That's WHM. The three systems that make up domain of one's own are WordPress, WHMCS, and WHM. At this point, we're going to actually jump into our demo school account, stateu.org. If you don't have a domain of one's own and you are here just looking around and seeing what's possible, stateu.org is a good place to start, to sign up if you don't have an account already, and look and play along as Lauren takes us through, not only the management of WordPress, but also the using of CPanel in some detail. So, Lauren, take it away. Thanks, Jim. Yeah, so if you want to follow along on your screen at that stateu.org, feel free to sign up for a demo account there, or if you already have a domain of one's own set up at your school, feel free to follow along in your own WordPress dashboard. But as Jim said, I'm going to be covering the first out of the three systems today. And later today, we'll talk more about WHMCS, which is our client manager, our record book. And then we'll also be talking about the CPanel server, WHM, where you can actually customize CPanel. But before getting there, we want to actually see what CPanel is. We want to understand that user experience for signing up for an account. So that's what this is. This is the main homepage that you'll see when you sign up for domain of one's own. It's a pretty standard WordPress theme. So it's super customizable. We do have a lot of institutions that rebrand and rethink how they want to frame domain of one's own for their community. So keep that in mind that a lot of what I'm showing you today is just the demo set up. And it's what we give you out of the box, but you can make changes for your school. So when I log in, because I don't have single sign-on for campuses, we have to have a way to log in to WordPress on the backend of things. So when I log in as a user, I'm just logging in through a main admin role on the WordPress dashboard, but your students, faculty members, anyone, your end users using domain of one's own will click get started. They will log in and authenticate with their single sign-on credentials and they will be then brought back to the sign-up page. So when you all log in as administrators, you will see this kind of WordPress wrapper bar at the top. It should look familiar if you are familiar with WordPress because that's what we're using here. So I will pop into the dashboard. You can see it's pretty, a pretty standard setup. There's a few things I wanna point to before we actually jump into the sign-up process. Namely, our main state university theme. So every institution is given their own child theme where you do have a lot of options to customize, updating logos, changing color schemes, all that good stuff will happen here and this will have your institution's name on it. I also wanna point to the themes to show you that child theme working there. So we have a lot of custom code that goes into connecting those three domain of one's own systems. So that happens here in this child theme and it's built on top of Enfold. So we've had institutions before that will want to rebrand and we'll turn off this theme and then everything breaks. And yeah, you broke the, you took out all the custom code. So it's definitely doable to change the theme. Just let us know beforehand and we can help you make sure that that custom code is brought over the way that it needs to be. Same thing with plugins. If it's installed and activated, there's probably a good reason why. So just keep that in mind as you're playing around with different tools that you may or may not wanna add it to the dashboard. A couple that I wanna point out right off the bat, remove dashboard access. Because this is a WordPress dashboard, we don't want all of our end users interacting with domains to have access to this backend space. We just want them to see the WordPress wrapper with C panel embedded. So this plugin is removing that access for them. User switching is probably one of my favorite tools for domain of one's own and it comes in handy when you are in the users list. So if I hover my mouse over these users, you'll see this switch to space. And that allows me to actually switch into a user's account, mask as the user and see exactly what they see. So that becomes super handy. I don't have to be right next to a user to troubleshoot alongside them. It's especially when you start getting the support tickets that are tweet length saying, my site's broken or I'm seeing a blank screen. It's like, well, it's not an issue with the C panel embed or something else. And so being able to switch to that user's profile is really helpful. Now, throughout the three systems of domains, you're gonna see various user lists. You'll have the user lists here in WordPress. There's one actually in WHMCS, which is our client manager and record book. And then you'll also have your list of C panel accounts at the server level. Not all lists are created equal. So I will say that this list is going to include everyone who has interacted with the system. Not everyone here is going to have a C panel account. WordPress creates a log for anyone that has authenticated with single sign-on. And we use that using WordPress roles. So when your user logs in and authenticates with single sign-on, a record will be created here and it will likely say subscriber. So WordPress roles determine what the user experiences and that's whether or not you want your users to request an account and they see that request form when they first log in or they just see the sign-up page. For the purposes of this demo school, we don't have a request form set up because all users can log in and get a free account by default. So we are pushing everyone to an author role, which allows them to just see that sign-up page. But you can put a step beforehand if you want and push folks to a subscriber role which allows them to see that request form. So for the purposes now, just trust me that the request form is there, but I'm going to move forward and assume that this person can sign up for an account and they're free approved. So because I don't have single sign-on, like I said, I'm going to just use a test account that I created beforehand. And so that's found here. So let's pretend that, you know, I am ready to sign up for an account. I saw my request form. I'm going to approve that account and change my role from subscriber to author. So that's kind of what I'm doing on the backend here. And that's the same workflow that institutions would use if they want to approve someone who has requested an account. I can see now that Lauren Hanks has this author role and if I switch to this user profile, I should see that sign-up form, which is exactly what we want. Assume that your users are essentially logging in with single sign-on. This is essentially the page they will see or something similar. Again, this is our demo account so it might look a bit different. I'm going to sign up for laurenhanks.stateu.org. This will likely be a project domain name that your institution has chosen. So that might be a top-level domain like stateu.org or it could be, you know, a subdomain like, you know, domains.stateu.edu or something else. Now I'm going to click continue and the system is making sure that that domain name has not been chosen anywhere else. I'm then met with a review and checkout form which allows me to check for typos. I can also see that, okay, my domain name, my account that I'm signing up with is associated with my name, so it's not anonymous. And then here, this is a demo school so we don't have it added, but a lot of our institutions like to add in a terms of service or checkbox to some acceptable use policy or something like that. So know that that's possible. We can always add that in. And now I'm going to click register now. And what's happening in the backend, this is actually the one time that our end user sees WHMCS in action. It is automatically creating that C panel account in the background while it's counting down from 10. And then it's going to redirect and I should see my C panel embedded in WordPress which is exactly what we want, perfect. So that is the main workflow for domain of one zone. You can see I've got my WordPress wrapper here at the top and I also have my C panel embedded. That's domain of one zone in a nutshell. However you decide to make that a self-service or add in the request form, however you all wish to do that is completely up to you but that is the main workflow for signing up for an account. Later on here soon we're going to talk more in depth about what happens in WHMCS when a user signs up for an account. We'll also look in WHM and C panel or the C panel server to see how that C panel is created and how we can customize the C panel. But for now I do want to kind of go through and just talk about C panel for a bit to make sure everyone's on the same page and has a solid foundation for the next two days. You can see right off the back here we have our university branding. So this is all coming from WordPress. So if you want to add in additional links for support things like that totally doable. This is coming from WordPress here. This is where our C panel starts. We have first our applications which are coming from Installatron which is a third party plugin that Reclaim Hosting is using which allows us to have access to tons of applications to install at the drop of a hat. So I'm gonna install WordPress here momentarily but I did want to point to some other full features right off the bat. We have a whole domain section which allows us to add in additional domains. So maybe you have a user that has a domain that they registered at GoDaddy. Maybe I have learnhanks.org and I want to connect that to my C panel account. I can do that here. Point DNS and go through that process. I can also create additional subdomains off of my existing, I can maybe I want blog.marinhanks.stateU. You can see it's creating a new document root. I'll explain where that is in a second. So I clicked create and let's see that refresh. Perfect. So you can see my subdomain has created and now I can install multiple sites or multiple applications on various locations of my domain. So it's not one application per C panel. It's as many applications as I want this quota allowing. So I'm gonna go back here. You can see I think right now, I'm not sure where it's showing my quota. There's my disk usage. So we don't have a ton on these demo accounts but that's completely up to you all to determine how much quota you wanna give each user. I will say anywhere from one gig to two gigs is pretty standard to start. And then of course you can create different versions of C panel. So you might have an advanced C panel package that has more storage, more access to applications, things like that. So we'll talk about that later on as well. I also want to point to file manager here which allows us to kind of pop open the hood of our account and see what's happening in the backend of things. You can see that directory route that I just created for my subdomain. Let me make that a bit bigger here. So that's available there. I can also see my public HTML which is currently empty. So that's, you know, before installatron we would have to manually upload files and create a database to install WordPress. Now it's much simpler. So I'm gonna pop back to my C panel here and I'll show you what I mean. I'm gonna click WordPress just as our example but of course, you know, you can install any application and I'll click install this application right there. And now for the purposes of this, you can see I can install it on blog.marenhanks which I just created. Or, you know, I'm just gonna keep it on this version there. Okay, I can also choose the WordPress version that I want to install. I'm gonna keep it on the highest version for security purposes. And then I have the option to set settings for manually or automatically updating my themes and plugins when new versions become available. This is a really helpful security measure, you know, just so we can keep all of our applications up to date even if you have a user who maybe logs in on day one, installs a bad, you know, an old WordPress theme or something like that and that becomes an issue over time. So I'll keep all of those settings there. I can install a WordPress multi-site if I wanted to but for now I'm just gonna click install. And while that's installing here, you can see it's kind of, I've got this little loading bar that's kind of going in. It's automatically installing those WordPress files for me. It's creating a database and doing that all without me having to lift a finger. Just clicking install WordPress. So this really, I mean, I remember the first time I was interacting with Cpanel as a student and this for me was just such a game changer because I didn't have to think about it. Now, when I go back to my file manager here, so I will scroll down, go to my file manager. You can see I've got the same directories but now when I click on public HTML, I've got all of my WordPress files right here which is really cool to think about. It was, again, it just completely clicked for me as a student to see all of the, okay, there's my plugins folder where I can go in and see the plugins that are installed automatically when I install WordPress. So anyway, there's a lot to do in Cpanel, a lot's possible here. We can actually customize this based on what you all want and we'll get into that more later on. But for now, just know that the functions here are endless and we're excited to continue talking about it. For most admins, you're gonna be looking and working in the WordPress, Portal and in Cpanel. That's gonna be 99% of your work but WHMCS and WHM do become important to understand how those pieces click and if something needs to be done and you wanna start digging deeper, it is really important to have a good overview of both those systems. So that's what we'll be looking at in the next hour. That should do it for this.