 I think we'll kind of get started here. But as always, these are kind of designed to be pretty informal. But we kind of wanted to highlight some cool work that we think is happening and some work that we think is cool that is happening. And kind of hear from sort of the process behind it. So I don't know if Noah's going to be able to join us or if he's having difficulties joining or something. But we do have John Stewart here. John, do you want to introduce yourself? Sure. Yeah, I'm John Stewart. I'm at the University of Oklahoma in what we call the Office of Digital Learning. Our office primarily works with graduate programs to put together online master's degrees and that kind of thing. But we also run our Domain of One Zone initiative here and then now the WordPress multi-site, which is I think what we'll be talking about mostly today. And I've been running that since 2016 or something. OU is one of the early adopters. And we've been sort of experimenting and playing with things. This is the latest experiment for us. Yeah, so I kind of wanted to see you just did big changes to the OU Create homepage. So I was kind of curious to hear about how that process started. I guess even what were the conversations around? Clearly, we have to make some changes here. Because before this design, you weren't using the stock one. You had a custom design on OU Create already. So what wasn't working, that kind of stuff? Yeah, I'm not even sure. I should have asked Adam if Adam Crume or if Tim Owens built the original site. But it was the one that we had set up when we first started up, the Domain of One Zone initiative. And it had been working well for the last few years. But yeah, the big impetus was that we wanted to switch to having both Domain of One Zone and this WordPress multi-site as options for users. And so we were trying to think through the messaging on that and just how to help folks who've never built a website before understand what those two options are and sort of giving them the choice of path without really understanding the destinations that they're going to is a bit difficult. And so we were looking for messaging around that just a clear way to convey those two options. And Coventry had already done that work a couple of years ago, I think. And I'd seen it a little bit as they were building it. But I got some time to dive back into their work. And we pretty shamelessly stole from their stuff. They're all CCO. And so it was consented stealing. But we took their language first and then sort of remolded it a little bit for OU and then redid the pages a little bit. And I went back and forth with Adam in terms of design. He's got a better eye for design than I do with his journalism background. But yeah, the big initiative was just how do we help people who want to build a website discover our service here at OU? And then how do we help them understand their two options or multiple options? Within domain of one's own, sort of since we started it, I would say that about 80% of all of our websites are WordPress, somewhere around there. It's a little bit hard to say with handwritten sites, just because those are harder to track. But something like 80% will WordPress. And the main area where students have difficulty is in the initial setup. Those first couple of hours of just getting a site up and running are the hardest. And so the WordPress multi-site seemed like it would solve a lot of those options, which was again a big part of the reason we wanted to go there. And so the messaging that we landed on was just if you're blogging for a class, especially if you only intend to keep the blog for a semester, go to the multi-site. And if you want to build something that's outside of WordPress, or if you want to build a portfolio that you're going to keep for four or five years, or if you need a high level of customization, go this way. But again, I don't think that a lot of our users coming in really understand the difference between the two systems. And so yeah, how to convey that? Yeah, one of the things that kind of stands out to me is right on the home page of OU Create. You've got, of course, the expected stuff like the login button. But there is a actual, you use the word domain of one zone for the obviously domain of one zone service. And then the decision, so I think it seems like, and this makes sense to me the way you described it, you're kind of saying, right, look, if you don't know what you want, what you probably want is WordPress multi-site. Or we're expecting that. And then you have kind of a, here's a domain of one zone button, and here's a link to what that's about, basically. And how did that kind of take shape in the language on, and I know this is getting extremely specific. But I'm kind of interested in how we describe these sort of complicated things to people that need to use it, right? So what was that process like? Sorry, I was looking to see if I could do screen share. Yeah, the, so again, we were very inspired by what they were doing at Coventry. They had set up about four or five different pages that really go through the different options. And so initially, we took all of those pages and replicated them and then customized them for OU. But in, once we had that set up, we were looking for just ways to streamline the communication a little bit. And so we ended up consolidating about three of their pages down into our homepage. And so I think this, I think our current homepage looks a lot like what Coventry has in their information for students. And that's gonna be our largest user base for the most part. But we also wanted to talk to instructors and help them understand how they could integrate it into their classes. And so I pulled a little bit from what Coventry had on their teacher's page also. So anyway, first borrowing their language, customizing it, and then like I said, trying to streamline it, we want something where students can get there and get into setting up a site in five minutes. And so the language needs to be more about why they would want to create a website at all and less about what the options are with still having that signposting, telling them that there are a couple of options. And so it, this was the balance we struck on how to do that. I was tempted to go the opposite way and just do an information overload for them, which is, I think always my temptation is just here's everything, here's documentation, here's your options, here's 26 different ways to build a website. But what we ended up settling on was, let's try to get them to click on login as quickly as possible and get them into the system. And then even at our login screen, it's a forked road. If I can figure out how to share a screen, can you walk you through it a little bit? Yeah, the bottom toolbar, the third button from the left should let you share your screen. Yeah, I was asking for permissions, but perhaps it won't actually capture. Perhaps not. Taylor, do you think you could share and talk people through it? Definitely can do that. Cool, yeah. So here's what we settled on. Again, my background is more in history as compared to design. So I always tend to like a black and white layout. I'm not a huge fan of lots of color in terms of websites. So Jen asks, how many students are starting a site in a typical semester? And so far this semester, I think we've had about 600. We tend to gain about 11 to 1200 users per year. And then a few graduate every year. And so the net tends to be somewhere around 1,000 per year. That have built up over time. And so I think since we switched over to the system, it's been about 400 so far this semester. And I anticipate it'll end up being somewhere closer to 600 or 650 for the semester. And so the students first get here probably. I'm gonna show you a separate way that they can enter the system here in a few minutes. But this is our traditional sort of URL that we've been using. Again, the login is the first thing they see. We really want them to just go ahead and click on that. But if they need some convincing as to why they might wanna do this, we try to talk to them about creating a professional portfolio. A few different colleges here at OU require a professional portfolio before graduation, an e-portfolio. And this is the way that we push when we're working with those colleges and what most of the colleges end up encouraging their students to use. Blog posting is really big for a couple of our classes. We have a journalism intro class where students just set up a blog and their assignment every week is to blog. And then we've also got some stuff going with our international studies where if you're going abroad, they strongly encourage blogging your experiences while you're abroad. So a couple of different sort of standard uses of blogs and portfolios. The next section with 63% of the web uses CMS and over 500 plus new WordPress sites being built every day is straight up stolen from Coventry down to the examples there. They're using here with Vogue and Ted and the White House and all. I assume these are still accurate. They were when I was putting it all together. But over time, people start off with a somewhat vanilla WordPress and then switch to something else. ESPN used to be WordPress as one of the examples I always point to. Yeah, Domain's Week or something similar, especially with Open Education Week going on right now. We used to, I can talk a little bit about, we have something called Creates, which is our awards every year. And that's been sort of suspended with COVID. So at the end of the year, we celebrate our best new websites that people are creating by giving out awards for the Creates. And so that's our normal celebration where we talk about what you can do online and show best examples. So it's a little bit after the fact. I would like a little bit more at the beginning of the semester. We run some workshops at the beginning of the semester, but it's less likely that students will hear about that at the beginning, then they will hear about the Creates at the end of the semester. It's easier for us to message to faculty and staff at the beginning of a semester or even mid-semester. An easier for us to message to students through those faculty and staff. And so they usually don't hear about us until later on. At least that's our experience so far. Yeah, the other way that we talk a little bit with Open Education folks is through our library services. And they've been helping people put together press books and other sort of open books for a while. We have a world geography textbook that runs on the domain of one's own WordPress site. And we've got a statistics textbook and several others that people put together a history of science textbook. Most of those through WordPress, but occasionally people are playing with Scalar, Omeka in one instance, and a few other systems. And so, again, good reason to still use domain of one's own. So yeah, this is the main site. If you click on login, I think I'll be interested to see what it actually shows you. We're SSO integrated. Yeah, so this is what I was hoping I would see. So eventually you'll hit a wall that you won't be able to get through. But again, wanting to show people those two options and really wanting to emphasize that most users will want just a WordPress option. But we've got some language in here about when you signed up for the service as to which one you're likely to have. And wanting to make sure that people who didn't even know about the new service who built their site a couple of years ago can still get to it. And it's still relatively obvious for them as to where they should click. We have had a few people who are trying to sign up for the new system who accidentally sign up for the old and a couple of people who have older websites accidentally signing up for the newer system. But that's becoming less common just in the first couple of months since we've put this up. And I just reach out to those people directly when I see their new signups come in. Their confusion is usually relatively obvious just from how they don't set up their site effectively. And sometimes they reach out to us for support through our contacts. Yeah, I thought this login page in particular was great because I mean, visually it's, I think it accomplishes what it needs to do. And in execution, it's pretty simple because I'm assuming these login buttons are just simply going to the actual login pages for each service. It's not like you had to modify login for either service, right? This is just a page in front of it really. Yeah, yeah, and so that was pretty easy. And the new system is set up under a subdomain, so site.create.ou.edu. And so that login just goes to that login system and then the SSO is tied in separately to the two. And so whichever one you click on, it's pushing you first into the SSO but then onto that system. If you do pull up sites.create.ou.edu, you'll see that it has a more minimalistic sort of front page. And that was, again, I'll probably change this later, but this is just meant to be very fast. This was, I think, using one of the standard themes for WordPress in that year. I don't think this was 2021, but it might be. Anyway, sorry, go ahead. I wasn't saying, I think it's the 2020 theme. Okay, and so I just wanted something that loaded really fast and was fairly simplistic. And so again, we try to explain a little bit of the difference here. But if you've gotten here, if you've, if someone's told you to type in sites.create.ou.edu, it's more probable that this is where you wanna be. And so again, just the login for this. And the thing that I wanted to show people for in this community was that we put together some new design guides, which are linked up there at the top of this page. And I was pretty proud of those in terms of just a different form of documentation for users. And so each of these is really operationally oriented. Just what is it that the student is trying to do and their walkthroughs on how to pick a theme, how to change your settings, how to organize your site. And so every time I get a couple of emails with the same question, I try to go in and write a new guide for the students. And these are either things that I've written or things that I've collected from Coventry and from Tim Clark and from whoever else that have already answered some of these questions, but with images from our system or hopefully up to date images from the last couple of versions of WordPress. Yeah, I didn't even know about these guides. These are fantastic. And I'm assuming most of the time people aren't, I mean, because this is the top page of the actual multi-site, right? So most of the time people are probably not hitting this unless they've been told essentially to come here. So that simpler design, like you said, makes sense. Yeah, and once they've created a site in their multi-site, maybe they're coming here to log in directly, but I think probably most traffic's still going through that create.ou.edu original URL and then going through that login screen there. So can I ask you a question, John? Is the actual WordPress multi-site wide open for anyone in the community and now domain of one's own is on a request basis? Like, so did you rethink how you were gonna allocate access to each of these? Yeah, exactly. So it used to be that the, but originally when you helped us set it up, the original domain of one's own was on a request system. And then after we sort of had proof of concept for a year, we opened it up to just being able to sign up. Anybody who could get through the SSO could sign up. Now, if you try to go through that login for the domain of one's own, if you already have an account, it just forwarded to you right through. But if you don't have an account, then it brings you to a gravity form. And the gravity form really only asks, what is it that you wanna do that you don't think you could do in WordPress multi-site? And then there's a link there to push you onto multi-site if you'd be happy with that. And so again, on that form, I try to explain a little bit of the possible things you could want to do that aren't possible in multi-site. And I try to sort of encourage people to think about, do I need no Mecha site? Do I need a really customized WordPress site? Do I need, do I just wanna write straight HTML? And if they can tell me that they wanna do that, then they wanna do that. But if they can't put that into words, then maybe they don't actually need it. So we're still getting signups for domain of one's own. But yeah, they're significantly reduced. Like I said, going from 1,200 a year to I think we'll have 50 to 100 over the course of the year. Yeah, and I think it's interesting too, because it also understands and meets the needs for a vast amount of the community and then focuses both of the tools. And one of the things I think I was really excited about hearing you talk about this was the idea of tiering some of these systems, a lot of the discussions around digital presence and that happens across many schools and the way in which like you've abstracted out a lot of that discussion and those kind of ideas. And then here's about the various tools you might need to get at that, right? And I think that's one of the things I really like about what folks like you and Coventry have been doing is abstracting out the project and then pointing them to whether it's WordPress multi-site, domain of one's own or even something else that might be more particular is super cool. And it kind of reinforces almost a series of toolboxes at the disposal of the university. So I really like the way you've done it. Yeah, yeah. And I still get a lot of the people who want to do something that's really customized still reach out to me directly or through our email create at oe.edu. But usually at this point, they're reaching out to me directly and they're saying, I don't really know what it is but I want to build a website for this group that does this thing and it's custom and sort of unique. And then I walk them through the options and tell them maybe this is best in a Drupal site or whatever. And so then I help push them. I go ahead and even set up their account in domains and help them get started with that. Often installing the app for them and sort of walking them through it. But there are people that get in there and just want to do it on their own and usually I can see that request form as soon as they submit it and go ahead and clear them for it. Or I've reached out to a number of students who've signed up for both accounts at the same time and I just asked them, hey, what is it you're trying to do and which one of these do you want? I haven't had any yet that said they wanted both. I have actually had a few people who already had a domain of one's own and wanted to set up a site just to test it out but I haven't had anybody going the opposite way. So Kristen asked how long folks can keep multi sites? So with the original domain of one's own we turned them off six months after graduation which is when folks at OU lose their single sign-on account. And so since they couldn't use the SSO account anymore they actually can't get in to create anyway. And so we would send them an email saying here's how to transition over to reclaim or multiple other options. But we sort of defaulted into here's how you might wanna move your domain over to reclaim. With the multi site right now I'm planning on letting them keep it for quite a while longer. There are a few different use cases that we've already set up where they keep it indefinitely and then just let me know when you wanna delete it. And then other use cases where I think we'll end up going with something like a year or two after they graduate, I'll reach out to them and see if they wanna keep it or delete it or transfer it somewhere else. I'm assuming that the same problem with single sign-on would hit the multi site though. Like they can keep the site but after they can't log in single sign-on they won't be able to edit the site or is that, or do you have ways around that? Yeah, I think they can, I need to check and make sure that this is actually enabled but they should be able to log directly into their site through, not through the SSO but through WordPress login. Oh, okay. Basically backdoor it. That would be the easiest work around. And technically I already know how to do that. I'm just not sure if we've enabled it. But yeah, it's a good question. I need to double check that that's turned on. We had Jen ask about sort of what support system are you working with for helping people with multi site? Is it you? Is it a team? IT help? How does that work? Yeah, so our Office of Digital Learning is responsible for all of this stuff. So IT handles most IT projects but actually Jim might know that they answered better to this than I do as to why our office got it. It's because of Adam Krum who originally set all of this up. So anyway, our office is responsible for both domains and WordPress multi site. And so if someone submits a ticket, it goes through our email system. So create adou.edu. And I use a ticketing system called fresh desk. And so it comes in through there and I see all of those and just try to resolve them. So theoretically it's a team of me and Adam and one of our other ed techs but in reality I can handle them all pretty easily on a day-to-day basis. We do escalate a few things up to Jim and the rest of the folks at Reclaim but those tend to be pretty obscure to many of one's own issues. We haven't, I think escalated anything off the WordPress multi site yet. So, and then like I said, if I get a question often enough on the multi site, I write a guide and then the standard response just comes to, you know, here's how to do it and here's this guide for more information. Awesome. We had a question from Kristin about, I think probably about the contact info. I did a question from a couple of minutes ago for, I'm assuming you're still just, well, the answer, but about retiring accounts I think is what. Yeah, and that's the big challenge is if we don't contact them soon enough, their OU emails get turned off and so that's why we have to contact them after about six months or within the first six months is because otherwise their OU emails will get turned off and then it's hard to find them. We do get some secondary, you know, Gmail accounts and those kinds of things, but typically if their OU email bounces then I have to, sometimes I'll even put like a temporary signup on their site. I'll put like a, you know, site maintenance contact OU kind of thing and hope that they reach out to me noticing that their site isn't working properly. But yeah, that's been a big challenge and we don't have a great answer for it yet. I'm not sure there is a great answer other than, you know, doing better at collecting secondary emails. I know one thing you can do at least in domain of one's own is you can suspend the accounts that terminate it and then, you know, they would, they'll get a message that says this account spent suspended and you can wait for them to see that or not. I'm not, but I'm not, I'm not sure the best way to do that in a really automated way and multi-site. WordPress multi-site has a really nice feature that underutilized called archive where you can archive sites will take them offline, but will keep them and then they can just basically be exported out should you want to. And I think underdeveloped on their side but with UMW blogs early on we did some of that archiving work. We kept everything there but people had requested we take it offline. And then there was relationships maybe with library to archive it long-term or just to make sure like Kristen is kind of pushing towards we always wanted to say can you get your stuff out cleanly? And with WordPress multi-site, you know with a XML export and import it to WordPress.com or your own space, it is pretty seamless. You've missed some of the database exports because WordPress multi-site database exports and all the settings like theme settings, plug-in settings some of that does get lost in the translation but that's, you know, it's always a balance given like your point too with support, John. Scaling a WordPress multi-site for thousands of users is actually manageable for one person which I think is amazing. Yeah, we've got, I think we still have about 6,400 users in the domain of one's own and then we're, I think probably it's 7 or 800 right now in multi-site but rapidly approaching 1,000. And I think over the next couple of years that'll shift to maybe 3,000 long-term and domain of one's own and more like seven and WordPress multi-site. Yeah, and I think, you know if we get up to about 10,000 users over the next couple of years that I'll still probably be able to manage all of that on my own or occasionally asking for help from Keegan or Adam. Sorry, I was looking through a couple of different questions. Someone asked, I've lost it now but someone was asking about plugins and themes. The themes question is a little bit harder because basically I went with a lot of the themes that I like and then I've been trying to look at themes that are, you know, have all the check marks and have been tested for responsiveness and accessibility. And so I go with those first but then also I'm trying to keep them simple. So I haven't put something like Astra or any of the element or stuff in there. It's all sort of more vanilla themes. And so Anders Noren's themes are always the one that I point to first because they're so clean and well-developed. And Anders I think is one of the lead theme developers now for WordPress. I think he was responsible for 2020 and 2021, probably 2022. But anyway, so I've got several of his themes in there. I think I've got about a dozen, maybe 15 different themes for folks to choose from. And then I encourage folks to, whenever I'm talking to them to let me know if they want something else and I'll test it out and see how it works. As for plugins, the first one that I came across and was trying to share screen again, but again, I'm sorry, I'm having trouble with it. There's a dashboard theme that I wanted to show and it customizes the dashboard. And I found this just by looking at coventry's like docs and then I sort of reversed engineered what they were using. And it's this really interesting sort of dashboard customizer where the first thing that people see once they log in is this custom dashboard. And so I put a video tutorial up there as to on that custom dashboard as to how to set up your first site. And then I've also got links from it to the guides and to the create documentation more broadly and then a list of their sites and they can set up as many WordPress multi sites as they want. And so that custom dashboard, I think does a lot of the work in terms of directing the traffic once someone gets logged in. And I was really happy once I found that plugin. So that was the big one that I started with. I can load up in my own screen at least and see what other plugins I'm running, jog my memories to what was really useful. I was also curious to know about the tools you actually used on the design of create that homepage. Like, is that Elementor or something else? Yeah, that's actually Elementor. So I've been using Elementor a lot on my own projects that I design. And so, it's sort of a sledgehammer, but I keep hitting everything with it. And I really like it. It was a big learning curve for me, but now that I'm comfortable in it, I feel like I can put together a site that looks decent pretty quickly with it. And so I've got a Elementor Pro account just under my own name. And I use it on whatever projects that I want to. Sorry, scrolling back through, there's so many comments I'm trying to show you. Really, they're flying in. We've got Tim Clark wants to know about if you can find a link for the dashboard documents that you created. Yeah, let me flip over to my audience. And Heather, you say more about the learning curve. Do you mean the learning curve of Elementor or? Yes. The learning curve on Elementor was, it just took a while. And so I think it's a really powerful app in terms of being able to customize pages and the way they have templates set up now. And also I think Elementor is a sort of a bridge for some of us to learn this new WordPress 2022 system, the new 5.9 WordPress that they've come out with in terms of thinking about templates for everything. But there's great tutorials sort of, especially on YouTube for Elementor. But Elementor Pro is extremely powerful in terms of the way that it handles templates and still sort of my preferred system. I know WPBakery used to be used a lot. And I was trying to remember what... Yeah, what's one of the others? Divi, Beaver Builder? Yeah, Beaver Builder was one of the other ones. But yeah, I like Divi. I didn't like Beaver Builder as much. I find Elementor of the page builders, while it is a lot, probably the most approachable. Like Divi is really powerful, but I don't know that I would describe it as approachable in my experience with it. And I see Kristen mentioned that they're trying to move towards the new page builder stuff in WordPress. And that's, I think gonna be really powerful, but there's very few themes that support it right now. But you also need less themes, probably, in that system. I will say that Moe just mentioned using Elementor with the hello theme. And I use the hello theme, I think on this one. And I use it in most places. The one thing that was interesting was just the way that we had originally set up the domain of one's own site. The header was like a separate piece of PHP that was like customized onto our original theme. The footer was as well. The SSO pass-through was as well. And so there was a lot of false starts in terms of customizing everything just to keep what Timmy had already set up for us working and not quite knowing how to reverse engineer it. And so I was constantly playing with like, what can I do in Elementor without breaking everything that Tim already has done for us? And I get it to work eventually, but for a while, like I couldn't get the site to be responsive like at all. It was just like grossly non-responsive. And that took me literally a couple of weeks to figure out like where exactly is this breaking? And it was because the header was stretching the whole page. You all were the first ones to like leave the end-fold compound and we were like, come back, don't you go, it's gonna break things, but your site ended up looking awesome. And- Yeah, I think there are a couple of things that if you actually look at the page code, there are a few things that are just not being displayed. And so a couple of pretty cheap workarounds in terms of they're still there, they're just not being displayed. But yeah, after a lot of trial and error, it worked out. I really like, I mean, one of the things, and it's too bad Noah's not here, but one of the things I really liked about, but what like about what both you and Noah or Coventry in Oklahoma did. And I know there's a lot of schools out there, even in this chat who have WordPress and WordPress multi-site or have Domain of One's Own and WordPress multi-site and are imagining how they can set up that kind of fork. You wanna build something? Okay, and then it's at that point where you make that decision very quickly, like you're designed to say, here's a quick sentence, and then I jump in and then forked you full on Domain of One's Own or WordPress multi-site. Like, I love the way you all both said it, and it's that abstraction out. Can you talk a little bit about the thinking there, just for other folks who maybe have these two separate systems? And how when you all went about it, you thought of it as one larger offering with two tiers maybe? Yeah, I didn't wanna get away from Domain's in that that's still, I still value basically everything that we've discussed for the last seven or eight years now in terms of wanting something for students to be able to learn with, like learn how the internet works. Keegan's workshop that he set up a couple of years ago on like just how the internet works is fantastic. And I still wanna run as many people as I can through that. And we talk about Apache and we talk about what are URLs and what are domain servers and all the rest of it, DNS servers, but at the same time, like the journalism intro freshman students don't care and they just do not care. They don't wanna go breaking websites. They just want something that works immediately and to turn in their blog posts. And so the balance between those two, still wanting to provide the opportunities for people to build whatever they want, break whatever they want. Several of us still have 40 or 50 websites running in a domain. I still wanted that. And especially for these like custom projects, we have a lot of stuff running with our library. We have a lot of stuff running with school of architecture, with other groups that are these big, multi-platform websites, very customized, some in HTML, some in WordPress or whatever else. And so yeah, the idea never really seemed like it would work to just turn off domains. It was always gonna be a both type idea. I still think that there's something that we could do and maybe it's in the signup where we offer a more ephemeral product, like WordPress multi-site, but just for a semester where it's planned to just be auto-deleted after six months or whatever. I don't know quite how to tie it to the end of our academic schedule, but I'd really like something like that where students can just tell us, I just want this for one class. And just have it auto-delete. And for a while, I can't find it anymore, but there was this blogging service for a little while that was like a blog where if you didn't log in after like a week, it would delete itself. And I really like that concept of just, I want to blog while I'm blogging and then I want it to delete itself and not be on the internet anymore. And with digital detox and with all of the, again, just a lot of the discussions that this community has had over the years, I think there's a call for that. Obviously there's a call for omega sites that are, you know, semi-archival and need to be up for a while, just everything in between. Yeah, that's brilliant. Actually, we have Noah Mitchell from Coventry has joined us. So that would be awesome. On top of already the great discussion that happened around OU with their packaging. No, we'd love and we've been referencing you. Your ears are probably ringing in England. We've been talking extensively about the work at Coventry. So we'd love to hear a little bit about your thinking. You had started as a demand of one's own school and part of the push there was to also introduce this WordPress multi-site component and then integrate them the way you did. Can you talk a little bit about that process? Yes, I can. Can you hear me okay, Jim? Yeah. Absolutely. Good, excellent. I'm sorry everybody massively late. I haven't a good excuse, but I want to tell it to you anyway. We were running a games design session. So we do a lot of game-based learning and we were just playing a new board game. Somebody's working on to talk about digital fluency. And my alarm didn't go off and we were just really into it. So it's a terrible excuse, but I'm a little bit proud of it anyway. So I am sorry about that. But I'm going to try to catch you up on what we've been doing with domains. So sorry, sorry, Taylor. Yeah, thanks very much for organizing. Yeah, with Coventry domains, we were already running domains of one's own for quite a few years with very many reclaim hosting and having a lot of good success with some of the staff and students that were using that. We did find that not everybody needed the full shebang. Ooh, there it is on the screen. I was about to share it. So what happened was lots of students would sign up. They really just needed a very basic WordPress site and they were having to kind of helpfully learn how to navigate SQL and the WordPress and do all these things. And that was great. But then they were also not keeping things up to date and we wanted for GDPR then to use cookies and sorry, cookie consent and privacy policies to get up to date. We wanted to offer them a managed service basically. So the desire was to have something that was a little bit more scalable and that was self-service that students can come in. So we have this desire to use WordPress multi-site. So the talks at Coventry and we have lots of back and forth about this were what do we do now? Do we keep using domains of one's own? Do we just need WordPress? And we pretty quickly decided, yes, we do need them both. And Coventry domains was gonna split into two kind of subservices. So we were gonna always retain the domains of one's own service and brand it to domains of one's own. Previously, Coventry domains and domains of one's own were the same thing, but we decided let's make Coventry domains be the umbrella and we're gonna start this domains of one's own service and then separately have what we call Coventry domains WordPress. And internally we call it do and multi-site. And so we had a challenge of communicating how these are different offerings to the students and what do we do? So my initial stab at designing this, this is the homepage we're seeing now, was to maybe do like a kind of 50 side by side or almost like on a most fast website to get like the pricing grid and make them seem really equal just to show what these two services are. And then ultimately we thought most people in our institution are gonna need multi-site. So we decided that multi-site default and most people, the natural user flow is to come to Coventry domains, see that WordPress is there, web publishing is a thing, we just generally talk about web publishing rather than talk about C-Panel. And yeah, feel free to scroll on through the site and we're just sharing some facts about, you know, I went and dug up some statistics of why WordPress is a useful thing to know, why getting online is a good thing to know, getting quotes from people who've used domains of one's own in the past and just generally applied that to web publishing and really, really selling the idea of just getting online and web publishing. Those things that would apply to both services. So we don't just talk about WordPress or the features of the service that much. I wanted to focus on the benefits and then who else was using it and the benefits that apply to both systems. So when you get through that and when the students click on log in or sign up or when they click on for students as one of the tabs at the top, the natural flow is for them to then sign up for the multi-site service. So separately to that and then there you have, so when they say get your free account with people click on that and come through that way, that just goes to our multi-site which is the wp.coventry.domains. So yeah, that just is where most people end up landing. So then we wait. We wait for people to tell us that this isn't enough, that they need to have a little bit more. So we wait for those graphic design courses to tell us that we want their students to be able to customize it, to pick this theme or that theme rather than just the 12 or 14 themes that we maintain most of them being Enders-Norran themes because he's awesome. And we maintain everything for them in terms of maintaining the plugins and keep the themes up to date. And we put a footer notice that is talking about this is part of Coventry Domains, part of Coventry University, all that stuff. So yeah, we basically, we just wait for people to tell us that they need a little bit more. And we said, have you met Domains of one zone? And that way they get to find out just that little bit more. We knew that this would cause a little bit of maybe confusion of what is the second offering and who's it for and who can have access because we're still gatekeepers of Domains of one zone and people still need to get us to give them permission and to grant them access. So yeah, they can come and do that. But by default, there's a single sign-on self-service sign-up option for Coventry Domains. And most people are using it and it's scaled really well. And this last semester, I think for the first time our multi-site users has exceeded our Domains of one zone users and that we expect will just continue to grow as it becomes the sort of default portfolio option for students at Coventry University. Some page that I did put in eventually, it was, this was gonna be front and center originally and then we decided, no, we just want people to do multi-site by default. If you scroll down to the very bottom and look in the footer, there's a comparison page. And I had to make it for everybody who was wondering what is the difference. So if you do the WordPress versus Domains of one zone, then you do get the side-by-side comparison. So that helps you make that choice. So somehow Domains of one zone where you know that's a thing maybe somebody was using it in the course previously and they wanna know what the new service is. Just this page has been super helpful just having that comparison thing for people to go and see. So if you're gonna have both services side-by-side, you'd have to think of your approach. You know, do you put this on your homepage and make it really obvious that there are two services? For us, we just wanted most people to think this is what Coventry Domains is, it's the multi-site. And for them to find out, actually, there's something a little bit deeper if that's what you need. So yeah, that was our design choice. This is the website and it's working for us so far. I don't think I've seen this WordPress versus Domain of one zone graphic side-by-side, but I love this, this is awesome. Yeah, definitely. That's helpful in a lot of the and the support inbox queries or when somebody's saying why can't I install this theme or they say they want a website but they don't really know what they wanna do and I'm trying to help them. Do you need something simple or complicated? Have a look at this page. So can I ask you a question, Noah? Yeah. One of the things that I was asking John and I'll ask you too, and I mean, Coventry really kinda opened this up this way of rethinking Domain of one zone in a way and that like it's still in your mindset Coventry Domain. So the larger vision stays, but the way in which you imagine both services under one umbrella rather than saying well WordPress multi-site is something else, go over there, this is just domains. What was the thinking to keep everything of a piece? Because I really think while subtle and logical and retrospect, I mean, we've been working with domains for years we started with WordPress multi-site but we never had that elegance of integration that Coventry really nailed with Coventry Domain. So I'd love to hear like, what was the thinking? How did you kinda say like, this is how we're gonna do it? It's arguing mainly. You've met Jonathan in our team, our director and he was adamant that we would keep Coventry Domain's the brand. Daniel and I, you know, also know Daniel, we were more of the opinion that we need a new brand and Coventry Domain's is still gonna be domains of one zone, that'll be the sub thing and then multi-site is gonna be called something else and we're gonna come up with a new brand. So there's lots of internal back and forth and just discussions and eventually the boss won. Surprise, surprise. But the intention was always to think, what is it that unites and brings together what Domain's is, which is this self-service going deep to playground, you can build anything you can maintain it yourself, you can develop some real skills there and this just multi-site WordPress only where it's just getting that basic blog up and starting to publish and being a producer and doing it really quickly. What brings those things together? And really it's just about being a creator and a digital citizen. And so the idea is to go to the students with that umbrella, which is called Coventry Domain's now and just say, yeah, these are the benefits. You're gonna be putting stuff out there online. Now you're gonna be showing people what you've got. You're gonna be a digital citizen. You're gonna maybe get some WordPress skills if you wanna use WordPress. So yeah, there was always gonna be that umbrella unifying concept of what brings it together and for us that's what publishing. So Coventry Domain's fits into our wider tech ecosystem within our portfolio, suite of portfolio tools as our core portfolio building tool. Some people in HLS or Health and Life Sciences use something called Pebble Pad a little bit more. Some people use to use Mahara a little bit more in the day, but yeah, with the introduction of multi-site, Coventry Domain's has become the default go-to portfolio building service for both staff and educators and the university. And people always continue to come with us with the use cases that they've had before, like a group of researchers wants to come and make a website for a project or so it's not just students making graphic design portfolios, it's all kinds of stuff. It's also interesting, and this came up with John and I know Kristen brought it up in the chat. How are you communicating to people how they take their stuff with them when they go? Like is there a very explicit, like you're doing it as part of school but we're kind of getting you ready also, like as you talk about building a career site, a portfolio, is there a clear like exit strategy? Wish it was clearer. So we've got a challenge now that now it's self-service, the Coventry Domain's multi-site thing, there's a bit of a danger that people don't, we can't control things as much because with domains of one's own, staff have to come to us and they pull out a form to say I want this module to have access and when the student sign up for it, we can send them a welcome email that gives them a link to our knowledge base that tells them about exporting their content when they're done and when they leave Coventry University and what that's like. So we've got two different knowledge bases and one's for really aimed at Coventry Domain's do and one's aimed at Coventry Domain's WordPress because there's slightly different answers to those questions. Both of them have information on how to export your things and take it with you. Obviously, you have a few more options when you have C-Penal access. So when somebody comes or a staff member comes for access for their courses, for their students to use Domain's one's own, we're very clear that you should be up front with your students, that this is just access while they're studying. You can take their content with them but it won't last forever because some people think it does last forever, they get in touch three years after they graduated and say, well, can I log into my site anymore? So we've got this new challenge of people coming in through the Coventry Domain's multi-site and if they've accessed it themselves with single sign on, they may not know that they won't have access when they leave, but we're working on that. We're trying to work with IT or called digital services a little bit more who are making students aware that the things they create as students, they can have options to export it but they're not gonna have range to the full suite of tools when they leave university. Some of those things stop like the day they leave, some of those things persist for a little while. So Coventry Domain's, they'll still be able to access it, I think as long as they have an active email address so it might be a little bit different. So there's some communication that needs to happen on the self-service angle, but yeah, certainly if they do look at the documentation, that's always there. I think we just need to do a little bit more to onboard people to come to the multi-site thing on their own. So well, I've got you on the call gym, that's actually a good point. I can't email people like an automated email as soon as they sign up for Coventry Domain's multi-site. That would be a good thing to include. I can't imagine why not. Yeah, I mean, in terms of WordPress multi-site, the ability to reach out with a very custom email about what it is and like we did with Domain in one cell and absolutely. Yeah, I think someone talked about MailChimp. Was that you, John, in the comments talking about how you're doing that? Yeah, I'll let you talk, I'll shut up. Yeah, that's more for sort of end of semester, end of year or big update type stuff, but we just drop our mail lists on MailChimp and I have a couple of different campaigns that I send out, recurring. We still have emails that y'all generate for us for the domain of one's own users. But yeah, I'm not sure that we auto generate anything for the multi-site users. So that would be nice just figuring that out. I imagine, I'm sure there's a plug-in that'll do it, but yeah, if anybody figures that out. Actually, you know what? One of the things that's interesting about WordPress multi-site, and again, in network admin, you can customize what that first post is and in that first post, it could be like, welcome to Coventry WordPress or Coventry sites or welcome to, oh, you create sites. Here's all you need to know. Here's what you need to know about exporting, here's what you need to know about getting support. And so rather than having Hello World, it could be a very kind of useful, like Ghost does when you ever set up a Ghost instance or some other sites, like their first original stock posts are actually documentation, right? And that's a kind of, they'll read that, you know? And I think that could be elegant. People might feel differently here on this call in terms of design, but that's one way at it. There's plugins that let you customize WordPress's notifications too, and I'm trying to remember the one I've used in the past, but there's one that was literally like, no, replace the default. You just signed up email with this instead. And I, it's been a while, but I've used one of those on a multi-site before. So I know it's possible with plugins. I just can't remember which one I use on top of my head. Yeah, that would be good. That could be a good way to start it, but I think something where we're maybe nurturing them a little bit, like maybe when you sign up for WordPress.com, you know, you're gonna get those drift fed emails that are gonna tell you about the features as you can use to it. So that kind of thing would be cool for us to set up too. I see Edbex put a comment there that they've got 20 emails that go out automatically from a trigger. So if the trigger is, you know, user signs up, they get this content. Or like Jim's saying, you know, the first page is gonna be an intro and a link to the support base. So I think that would be good for us to do. So yeah, we're definitely not done with it. That would be a great thing for me to go and iterate next as I find this down. Yeah, I remember there is a MailChimp plugin. I haven't tried it in terms of setting this up, but yeah, in terms of like triggering a drip campaign, that'd be interesting. And Ed says that they've got some emails that are out of triggered, presumably maybe off of a PHP hook or something. And I'll just say here, because I can't go a community chat without talking about Coventry Learn. The whole idea of reframing Coventry domains around that sense of web publishing and literacy and having that support documentation, because we've heard from our community in these chats that that's one of the things that, you know, we need to work on is that community support documentation. And I think that goes hand in hand with this idea of the literacy and the kind of project of what these are doing. And so thinking through that has been really useful. So in that way, Coventry domains on a lot of fronts was doing a lot of different pieces to bring that idea of it, not just about a domain of one's own, but about publishing to the web, certain amount of literacy and understanding what this whole new framework and ecosystem, like you said, is about. So I really do appreciate all the different pieces that came out to make for that shift, which seems subtle, but really for me is gigantic. Cool. I suggested the plugin and that's the one I've used, better notifications for WordPress. If that's helpful for anyone, I have it linked. And Noah linked to their support documentation for multi-site as well, which also looks pretty great as a compliment to the domain of one's own side of it. I wonder if there wouldn't be a space for a plugin and WordPress plugin and theme jeopardy, where you're like, these plugins list topics and it's like, this is the plugin that does, you give description and someone has to name the plugin. And then you win or lose. It's like, maybe a very specific group of people would be interested in that, but consider me one of them. That sounds amazing. But yeah, definitely a very particular group of people. Like, I don't know that that's gonna get picked up beyond the pilot, that show. But one thing I find really interesting in hearing from John and Noah, the two of you, the way that you both have the same problem of like, okay, we obviously need to describe to our users, what these things are. And you're handling it pretty similarly. But where my understanding, John, is that at OU, you're saying like, this is probably what you want. And then they have a form right where you can, they can request a domain of one's own account if they want it. And you're kind of helping them figure out like, okay, no, you can actually do that on multi-sites. You should continue there. And at Coventry, it sounds like you're kind of handling that after the fact of like, go in here, play here first. And if you specifically reach out, it's a similar model. How have the two of you managed people who decide to switch after? Like, has that happened a lot or not really like the, because it's hard to move between the two systems. There isn't like a, hey, we hit a button and now your site's over here. Or is that just not come up super often? So, I'll go, I'll take this one first. We've, yeah, because we have that flow where the default is multi-site and when you're ready for something else to move over, I just tell them to follow the docs on exporting your site. Like, if you set up with your claim posting or you're unhoused and yeah, so they mainly just do the XML and export and then have to set up the theme on the new site. And that's fine for most people. They're happy with that and they just start building what they like. If they want to use the same theme, that's how I'm going to find the theme. So, no, that's okay. And there's not been that many people that move over. It just happened some. We also, I just wanted to point out that while there's not a lot of individual students coming up to say that they want domains access because generally it's done module by module. That's historically how it got started. This was something that was learned, used as part of assessment. So, you know, the module leader would sign up for it. So we sometimes have a quick conversation. I ask people in my lab to give this person access. The module doesn't have access. I usually do without asking anyway. So, it's not in this form because I like people to be able to use domains of one zone. But yeah, officially it's something that your module leader, your lecturer will request and then everybody in the module gets access. But yeah, there's not been loads of people that move from one to the other. There's been a couple that have, this is mainly staff who have started with domain of one zone. And they just, their plugins kind of break or they just have trouble installing a theme in the first place. And they've maybe done a few posts and stuff. And I tell them, it's very easy to move to this other service called multi-site. And there's been a few people that live on that way. But yeah, it's mainly just the XML export that we use. Cool. Yeah, same thing for us is the XML export and then yeah, recustomizing the theme installation. The one example I really liked in terms of moving from one system to the other was just one of our English professors who's been more experimental and playful with WordPress and with the web generally. Just wanted to see if he could replicate what he'd done in domain of one zone in the WordPress multi-site. And so he really developed his own sites there. Also had his students for his current semester set up sites in the multi-site system. And then the other thing that he was wanting to play with was the RSS aggregators that we all used to use. And so he's still having, he's having his students sign up in the multi-sites and then he's aggregating those through his domain of one zone account. Just to put on that plugin. Yeah, it's just awesome. Well, it's still like that log hub system. Yeah, well, it's funny because like, I know Ed Beck, he was paid by commons in a box to be into that. And you all don't know that, but more seriously, like the idea is you base, and I love commons in a box, so I'm joking for you, but the idea in a WordPress multi-site that gets overlooked sometimes is that all of those pages and posts can have a common tag across the entire instance. So you can aggregate if a student in totally different sites used the same tag, it can all aggregate into a core site. And that was the beginning of a domain of one zone in WordPress multi-site, was everybody write it in their own portfolio, but aggregate through tags. So you saying that, John, with the whole like edgy blue, which I've been dreaming about on my blog recently, like that's the kind of emergence of it. And to come back to it alongside domain of one zone is so super awesome. So I'll let Ed shoot me down here, big fan Ed. I'm joking, you know that, right Ed? I'm a big fan. We should do a commons in a box community. Yeah, that's definitely gotta be a future community chat. I mean, I hear so much of what people are asking for. And what commons in a box open lab does for me is I have a community site already built in that includes every site in my entire network. Those sites are sorted between portfolios, classes, projects and organizations. I have notifications set up because it already has it. You know, when I install the commons in a box plugin, it installs that better notifications for WordPress. Plus they've written sensible defaults already so that I don't have to use my brain space on it. So I already have like 20 notifications already set up. Welcome to the site. You know, oh, you just got promoted. Oh, you just joined a group. Oh, there was just a blog post on a group that you're a member with. I do, just like everybody else, I do mix and match domains of one own and the WordPress multi-site. I can connect back to my commons in a box open lab through RSS. And so it still appears in my community site even though it's external. And I get all the other features of commons in a box but not the user management. If a faculty member makes a group site, they can invite their students because they have built that feature in. If a student wants, needs to do a portfolio for a class but is only doing it for the class but doesn't really want this thing to be world public, we can set it so that it's private, you know, so we can comply with FERPA. I mean, they've, you know, I have such great admiration for what CUNY has done because it's like, it's checking all my boxes as I go down. To that point, I mean, and again, we'll put a pin in this because we should return it and bring in the commons in a box folks. But like, to their great credit, like they released their own instances regularly. Boom Gorgeous actually like packages it all up and it's done and there's, but like it is a well-oiled machine that's been done for now years and they have a one-click installer. Like they have done a lot. The one thing with commons in a box that can be is running it in a shared hosting environment. It often does a lot of work. So at that point it might have to be on a VPS or something like that. So, but it is a super powerful tool, right? But yeah, and I've got, I'm, you know, I've always had it in our domain of one zone is just taking up one user in my domain of one zone knowing that someday when this gets, you know, huge, I'm gonna have to move it to Reclaim Cloud. You're giving me Agita to saying that, just so you know. We have the people who are staying up all night looking at that load, not you and us. I would like to know, you know, as, you know, as part of the discussion on multi sites inside a domain of one zone, I'd be interested in knowing what you're looking at and what I should be aware of. So I know when that load is too big for the shared hosting server. Yeah, I think when you start getting into like, you know, running a WordPress multi site, like full blown for, when you're saying this is open to the community of campus, I think you're gonna start getting hits and people are running it, you'll know. I mean, if you're doing a kind of test and it's a pilot and it's a control community, but I really like just because of the way, like Noah and John could speak to this, you know, within just a few short months, you have hundreds or thousands of users on it. And logging in all at a class. And we've all run into this. Even commons in the box, who's on shared hosting, ran into this even recently, like yesterday. And shared hosting just has its limits. And even a VPS that's kind of shared hosting with domain of one zone that has all these different accounts, you'll hit those same limits. But we could talk about that, but that would be just the one caution danger, danger there. And it can be tricky too, because there's not like a number. It's not like we can be like, oh, after 150 WordPress users, it's not like that, because it's very situational and how is the site used, when is it hit, what type of themes and plugins are installed, what's the size of the database, post tables, all of that stuff. So very often, if you know that it's gonna be a larger scale thing, it comes down to like, okay, well, it's slow now, so it's time to move it. Or, okay, well, we're getting errors every once in a while when loading the page, so it's time to move it. And so, not that there can be other ways too, but it's extremely situational. And it is worth, I mean, and I don't wanna turn this into a, it is worth just saying that Tim Clark pointed to the whole Sunday night phenomenon. Like once you have a WordPress multi-site, that's now kind of quote unquote enterprise, like people are going through it default and then maybe domain of one zone. There's also a different expectation of uptime. And that, and so when you get to that point, you know, like this is enterprise, we gotta put the resources behind it. And that's where the third tier, if it's WordPress multi-site, then domain of one zone, the next bit is a scalable cloud-based infrastructure, like Reclaim Cloud. So you have to understand, like Noah and John, as you all are doing stuff like this and the folks out in the community, you're helping us understand what it is we provide to our community. So just as part of this chat, I wanna say thank you both for the work you're doing to help us understand what people really need this for and how they're using it. And to see WordPress multi-site get in love still, you know, how many years after, you know, it hit the education scene is super cool. So anyway. Yeah, thank you all. Thanks to John and Noah especially. It was really awesome hearing about the great work you both are doing and your teams you're on are doing. And Ed, now I think you have people who are gonna be calling you, so. But also like just, I know there are folks like Trinity, Skidmore, a lot of folks who have domain of one zone and WordPress multi-site and who may. So if you do wanna talk with folks or you wanna reach out, let us know, you know, whether John and Noah, if you all like are thinking, but if you wanna run it through us or discuss that, just let us know because it is cool what you've done. And I think people have a lot to learn from it. Yeah, I wanted to say thanks to Noah for making all of your stuff open and letting us pretty shamelessly, you know, rip it off and we package it. So I appreciate it. All right, so let's therefore enjoy. We do like a little credit in the footer if you haven't got one. But now everybody's very welcome to come and use the option of that to save people time and if it's a good place to get started, please steal. We should have share and share like licenses on everything in terms of both the multi-site and the domains on a knowledge basis. So do that, that sounds good. If you want more, we've also got teach.coventure.domains which is our again, it's pedagogical best practices for educators, but if there's anything pasty in there, you're welcome to use that as well. I'm sorry, so I'll drop a link. But yeah, definitely we'd like to keep everything open source while we can. Yeah, thanks for all. Great documentation always. All right, I think I'm gonna hit stop on the recording, but this is great.