 experience WordPress Multi-Site basically thinking through how you might use WordPress Multi-Site or how you are using WordPress Multi-Site to support a community of tens, hundreds, thousands of publishers. And so given that I started talking and I'm hoping others will, I'll give you a little bit of my background with WordPress Multi-Site and then we can share other people want to chime in and talk about what they've done. So back in 2006 I started a prototype for what would be UMW blogs with WordPress Multi-Site and it's actually interesting because around that time there was someone at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill who was forked WordPress and had kind of created a WordPress Multi-Site system but it wasn't WordPress what was known at the time as WordPress Multi-User or MPMU. They had created their own and I was using that for a minute and I probably have blog posts about it but soon after WordPress announced WordPress.com and WordPress.com is obviously the most notable WordPress Multi-Site instance in that it's a single WordPress database that can run thousands, tens of thousands probably in the case of WordPress.com millions of sites and that was something that we started at UMW. It became known as UMW blogs to support well over 10,000 faculty, students and staff to do everything from create like student sites, the newspaper, journals, core sites, portfolios. I liked WordPress a lot and I like WordPress Multi-Site a lot because it was you protein. It could basically be anything because you could use various plugins, themes, etc. That was in 2006, 2007 we officially announced UMW blogs and that platform, Shannon who's not here but usually is, can attest is still running because it's a little bit long in the tooth like some of those who started it. They're kind of retiring it in order to bring on what they're calling UMW sites but it's basically a fresh start of the same thing for their community. So that's one instance of a WordPress Multi-Site that I think for me the greatest thing about WordPress Multi-Site it was easy for at least one or two of us to manage and to scale for an entire community of faculty and staff and students who needed that, who had a need for that. And one of the questions that comes up and it may come up today is why that versus something like your own WordPress site in a cPanel environment and so that's an interesting question if anyone wants to talk about that but regardless that's my backstory WordPress Multi-Site. I still think it was the single most kind of utilitarian and powerful tool, open source tool that I've used as a as a kind of ed tech in that in that context and led to a lot of very interesting stuff at UMW. Anyway I've said enough. I think it's kind of interesting like so I threw in the chat like I didn't even really consider the fact that WordPress.com is kind of a WordPress Multi-Site like before you drew that connection just because of the scale of it right but yeah it is interesting to me just to think about like how like I would really love to hear from there someone on their team at automatic of like what what do this gets into WordPress Multi-Site and improves that or what do we take from like how that relationship works I guess as a person who's just kind of always curious about how open source software or how it goes over its lifespan and stuff like that because yeah I didn't even really think of that as a WordPress Multi-Site but of course it is. I feel like the other the interesting thing to me about Multi-Site and this is not something I really appreciated until I started at Reclaim and kind of saw what folks are doing with it is like how much you can scale a Multi-Site like how big how many sites how many people using it how long they can use it while keeping that maintenance kind of at a single level the whole time right like there's not you don't need you know a you don't need 10 servers to provide 40,000 sites right like you can do that with one big Multi-Site install if you really want to and that's really fascinating to me especially as someone who before this worked at a place where it's much smaller scale so I wasn't really used to encountering those kinds of numbers um like my most of my experience with Multi-Site before I started Reclaim was retiring Multi-Sites and moving them into domain of one zone as individual c panels so I was kind of like yeah I guess you could do that but seeing how much you can do with a little on a Multi-Site is insane and and by a little I mean server-wise but also like support time-wise like you don't have to be you can you can keep that up and running for users for such a long time and with so many people with relatively little work interesting Ed just brought up the idea of jetpack and one of the things Shannon who I keep on talking about Shannon I'm sorry Shannon but talked about recently one of our WordPress Multi-Site sessions is she went into WordPress.com to help someone and literally like could not recognize it anymore as a WordPress Multi-Site like it was such a different experience I don't know if anyone's had that experience with WordPress Multi-Site or WordPress.com the differences but like it literally is a morph of its own thing and I think jetpack and the various tools they built around it and how they're using React and JavaScript to build that has has been defining and that being its own ecosystem like literally and based on WordPress Multi-Site but a long way from from that reality. Yeah Taylor and I got into it one day we were talking about the differences between automatic and WordPress. I made I made a comment where I was like oh I really like suggesting the automatic themes to my users because often they're set up to be super simple and really easy to be moderately successful with very quickly because that's the WordPress.com business model and and seeing a separation between what automatic does as WordPress.com and what WordPress.org does is sometimes interesting because many of the very user focused features get implemented first on WordPress.com because they're trying to simplify, simplify, simplify. Yeah and it's kind of it makes a lot of sense too in terms of like open source projects in general you often have like a need for more like user interface design folks there's often like a lack of that and to see that obviously a company like automatic that is selling it's very different relationship to the product right it's a product I guess fundamentally for you know that it's kind of cool to see that that I think works in both directions a good way for folks using WordPress right like you get this folks that these folks that are really interested in developing that and making sure that that's easy to use and whether or not we agree with all their decisions and you get this open source foundation that is making sure the technical core is really good and and it's portable and you can move it multiple places and host it multiple places that's the really cool thing and that's kind of why like it's interesting to me like for multi site in particular there's not really anything like WordPress multi site that it's not it's not like there's ghost multi site right or or I mean maybe I'm wrong I guess there are like a lot of like proprietary CMS's that like campuses use for and that's kind of like WordPress multi site but not really in that they don't usually aren't intended for folks to have the level of control an individual user gets in multi site so that's really kind of cool I have an instructor that uses it's either Wix or Weebly I stop paying attention after the W because it's not open source that has similar controls to WordPress multi site has kind of admin controls over their students blogs and can do that so we see those structures other places that that I think is interesting I also I'm thinking now of there's definitely CMS's that are specifically dedicated to portfolio sites and I wish I was looking into them at Carlton when we were transitioning away from WordPress multi site and looking at other options and I wish I could remember the name of the one that I was looking at I'm gonna google it and put it in the chat see if I can find it but education education sounds right but the idea of it was being used by one of the Alaska state universities in Alaska and it was huge and so I think that they really liked that they could have a lot of control over it but again that that was something that I believe was proprietary yeah and and so so often those platforms like live text is a big one or watermark and I remember what it's called anymore that might be the company but I was always not a big fan of those because you usually are trading it's like yeah we don't have to administer this basically at all like it's just handled for us and then often not always but often it becomes not very valuable to the student making the portfolio anymore because they don't get any flexibility in how it looks and how they tell their story it's just like yeah I can upload PDFs here and put my name on it and that's what it is and that is always such a bummer to me because it's like okay well why are we doing these portfolios is it just for program assessment because do they even need to be websites if that's all it's for you know and I always like how flexible multi site gives I'd like to make a comment Taylor um I'm Mari Miles I managed the WordPress multi site at UNC Asheville hi Laurie hey Jim how are you um and it's great to see like faces with the names because I've seen names there are emails and reclaim hosting and stuff and support but I will say that one of the things I'm challenged with is uh the fact that the students who are doing um are using our WordPress sites have all different levels of expertise in dealing with website billing tools and one of the things that we offer is this WordPress site that they can practice on so one thing I find that when I look at or go to meetings about WordPress it's highly web developer um well web developer attended and so I have to say Taylor the simpler the better for our students and our faculty and one thing that I'm concerned about is I'm seeing WordPress transition the next upgrades some of the stuff is really complicated and I don't think the students or the faculty are interested in doing these like like the full editing stuff and so I've kind of cut that off and in the uh the newest versions and not made it available because it would be so complicated for them to use and I think that's one thing that is important as web developers you got to remember that if you're giving students or novices an ability to play around with a web tool then they need to kind of not deal with the most complicated stuff especially a student because they'll just get all wrapped up in the technology and not actually do the assignment or they get lost in the assignment so I hope I'm making sense and I don't know where to go with it um I'm a little concerned about the direction that WordPress is going truthfully I'm yeah I'm glad you said that because that that is definitely I first of all I agree with you right like because the the complexity for for lots of people can get in the way right and we've definitely come up with these community chats about the the direction of WordPress and full site editing and like Gutenberg too just like that you know that post editing and page editing because a lot I think a lot of us I think share that concern of like hey this is not you know not for everybody clearly um so yeah and that that is something I'm always kind of curious about is like how can you make that a clean on ramp um and some of it we don't always have control over as admin some of it we have to like be like no we're just that's not ready yet and we're not gonna make that available um because I I would say I 100% agree with you especially on full site editing like I I think if I was um doing this especially for student portfolios or something like that I I would make the default theme just not one of those themes because I don't think it's ready yet for everyone I would maybe think about having it available as an option and say like yeah you could use this and hear some information about it if you want to but this isn't gonna be our our defaults um and I am really interested to see how automatic and WordPress the WordPress community like continue down that and make that better and more palatable but I'm also interested to see about like where like it's to me disappointing that 2022 is the default theme I think that is not a great choice personally 2019 so great either Taylor nope I haven't liked the last couple of present I think uh what was the one with the plant um 2017 that was a great one let's still you know um but uh so I I disagree with that choice but I think it's it's kind of hard because I think for a lot of the WordPress like open source community they're still thinking of WordPress as like well the person who installed this set up a database and put all these files in it's like I don't know if that's the majority of people using data uh WordPress um certainly not the people I work with and talk to but yeah I just want to follow up on what Laurie said because it was exactly a conversation I had with a fellow kind of ed tech enthusiast yesterday she put out on a public discussion forum that we use across SUNY hey we're starting to look at e-portfolio programs now this person is located at Geneseo so they already have two WordPress multi sites they've got an open lab and they've got a vanilla WordPress multi site um um and I responded to it and I just said hey you know we use open lab I'm very happy with it next month we've got Charlie Edwards coming to campus from the city tech group part of the group that develops the open lab but I think there's two strong arguments against using WordPress as your portfolio system and the first argument against that I would say is that it's messy you can make a bad looking WordPress site but I don't think you could make a bad looking digication site I would counter that and say I don't think you could make a really great looking digication site um and you could make a really good WordPress site but I think I see more bad WordPress sites than I see really good WordPress sites you know when I see a really good one I'm like oh this person has a little bit of talent in this and then the second thing is the data a lot of people buy these as like the upstream data middle states compliance systems and WordPress is just never going to do that and and as much as I hate that conversation I can't ignore it if I want to keep serving my campus I hate that when when when education decisions are made completely on data but I I can't ignore that I have to find solutions for that if I want to keep the type of solutions that I want available available to the campus I think I talked oh sorry I would just say I mean to Lori to your point I think a tangent Ed to yours is like WordPress for the for the web developer it seems to be that direction when you see some of the themes and and the Gutenberg and there is the choice people many people who run WordPress multi sets here might have to make like how do I support these new tools like Gutenberg and full site editor and also and that's like in a case by cases I'd be interested to see like you know what questions you're getting are you getting people who are saying I want the full site editor like how is that transition going because I think that's a shared pain Lori so I'd love to know hey how you're doing it and other people who manage WordPress multi site like what is your approach to the is it just you know like wissy wig old school editor classic editor done or what no I I definitely support the Gutenberg editor with the students but I when I look at some of these things like the full site editing or whatever it just it's complicated to me so for someone who's a novice or brand new to WordPress to throw them that kind of instructions it's it's just beyond it's it's it's not necessary for them to get a feel for what WordPress is about and building websites is about and communicating on the web and so I don't I'm not necessarily getting any particular questions I'm mostly just looking at the new stuff that's coming and going that's just way beyond what they are going to be happy with now I know our our campus actually uses WordPress for their campus website and they've just cut off all I mean it's just the classic editor they've cut everything else off so it's just easy for them to keep it updated and and other people to use it when they're building their own like department sites and one of the things I just put in the chat here too I really liked what Tom and pilot were saying yesterday in the session around you know being really strategic or particular around around how many plugins you're bringing in to have various solutions so not overboarding your dashboard with four site editors which of course we all know can be quite heavy in and of themselves so compiling them on top of each other you know but as a larger instance you know sticking with one or two solutions and then the the conversation with folks is this is what we can support in-house here is our solution for what you're trying to do and if you want to run another tool you know let's maybe consider a single instance of WordPress in cPanel or something else so you're still sort of providing offerings within the parameters of the multi-site but you're not letting it go further than what you can support because ultimately you want to keep these instances sustainable so that was something that that I really liked from yesterday's conversation and the other thing I wanted to raise too is you know I think with WordPress multi-site conversations it's really easy to start talking about the very large institutional WordPress multi-sites or you know the big legacy instances that you know are just very big ships to move but the other thing I am interested maybe at some point we can talk about is you know how faculty or individual users might have their own multi-sites for course organization um you know and when you have users that are considering hosting multiple single WordPress instances versus having their own multi-site to manage courses semester after semester so I'm not sure if that's something that you will see or if you're really just more using WordPress multi-site at a larger scale I think a really nice example that I saw was a conference that used a WordPress multi-site so that they had a domain for each year so they could leave the past years alone and just keep picking a new modern theme each year without changing the old one I thought it was really simple and really elegant way to like allow each year to have its own identity while still just being on the same WordPress install I was writing in the chat but that's a good idea and maybe something that Reclaim should do again if we have a couple of domains conference sites that are out there floating that I think we've flattened into static html for some but you know we could probably consolidate that a bit more so I like that for events too I um at one point had used it for supporting a class that had like 10 people every year take it it's a small class but every year they wanted to add like they wanted to make a resource at throughout the course of the year on a particular topic and they each of them had a different topic and so the point of the multi-site was they would log in just get a site start writing and at the end of it it stayed there because the next year's class was built on top of it and that was a pretty good resource or I think it was a pretty good use case for multi-site because it allowed me to really focus on making that like what and they did that for a couple years I don't think the person teaches that class anymore but like that that was great because I was able to invest the time in being like like I set up single sign-on for it like and it was not a huge multi-site I think there was maybe 30 sites but like throughout the the use of it but it was like really fast for folks to get started with and you know I picked like three themes and I was like if these if you're unhappy with these here's my email address but maybe just make one of them work for you and they were all pretty simple themes and it let people do some cool stuff and then you know it was ultimately like they're publishing something on the web but they didn't have to think too hard about the design of it yeah and there's a good some good questions in the chat too around themes and stuff like that like Robin I know when we did UMW blogs we probably had 150 themes and that was that was interesting and please jump right in I don't mean but there's some good questions in the chat so follow up on those I'd love to and go for it it's good to see you green backup it's awesome oh yeah that's uh that's my paint I chose green it's like my house uh has all kinds of colors in it and we decided all of that paint like there's green here in the living room our kitchen is yellow we have uh my partner's work room is like black and yellow we have blues it's it's a rainbow over here it's cool um but anyways I think Anika did you have your hand raised okay um I was just going to piggyback off Taylor's example um we have used multi site or WordPress multi site for just individual cases um usually faculty teaching a course on e-portfolios and having students set up their e-portfolios within that site so that the faculty member can control the themes and the plugins that they use and we talked about approved plugins versus um network network activated versus just uh plugins to install for specific portfolios um and that makes it easy for just that one case I have not done a WordPress multi site for the entire institution although I think it would be helpful just to have those one off portfolios for students who just want to create something and then take it out um one of the issues that we did run into is rights to ownership of of that site does it it's student created content so they have the right to their own content however it is owned by the faculty member so I go through a process of getting it approved by if the student wants to take it out if they want a copy of their site they can obviously get that but if they want it removed from the site after they're done with the class or they graduate I go through a process of saying um I've talked to the student we also need to talk to the faculty member since they're the one owning it and of course it's approved by an institution if they want to remove it so I'm curious if anyone else has run into that issue of rights and ownership I had run into something similar but mine where it was this in this particular example wasn't a multi site but it was students making um portfolios on their own c-panel accounts for a class and most of them I think were in like their own like a new WordPress install and at the end of it because in this particular case the the faculty member was like this will be great because they can make it their own way they can integrate in their own way they're all about that I think it was for communications so it was pretty relevant to the types of work they were doing that was awesome but then at the end of it they're like well we really need these to exist for program assessment like you know for a while right like even if the student wants to delete it and so we ended up using like archiving tools to make copies that weren't even public so it was like all right here here's a copy here's a zipped up folder of what it is if you ever need it you can unzip it and open up the file and it'll view it in your browser and that worked okay for that situation um but it can be really tricky with that like is this my content if I created in your space like it's so situational and obviously everyone has different thoughts about that too like I typically end up on the like I usually want to give students whatever rights I can right like and say like no you made this you should be able to delete it too that's a valid choice um but um that was that worked well for that situation is saying like let's keep a copy of this but it doesn't necessarily have to be public um but yeah just bouncing off of that uh Taylor I have actually been on the opposite end of that um which is when I was a student at Carlton we I was working with a faculty member uh I was taking a portfolio capstone centered on digital humanities digital work and how that sort of thing is presented online for a very young program it was the first time that that capstone had been uh offered and so when I left Carlton I ended up pulling it wasn't in a multi-site it was WordPress in a domain of one zone uh c-panel and I ended up getting basically a zip copy of that taking it with me and then I could rewrite it and update it and make it my own professional site which was the general idea but that's still out there because the professor has keeps really tight control over his c-panel and really wanted that content to stay both for assessment and for future examples and because that was sort of the philosophy of showing off your digital work and leaving your footprint which is an interesting conversation about having ownership over your digital work in the end um that I was not brave enough to have with a guy who was handling my grades at the time but yep that's the really tricky thing I think I know who you're talking about pilot yeah I think you do but yeah when you talk about archival in general or keeping something around to have it preserved you know usually what's to follow is permissions for that right or giving folks an opportunity to opt in to keep their their stuff or to opt out and that becomes very tricky especially since every software is different right just uh on my WordPress multi-site um I have published press permissions on it's a it's a plugin that you can edit the permissions on a single sub-site and it's I've got the way I've got this set up is only I can turn it on but when I one of the use cases I use it for is I change the role ability of authors so that authors can see private posts and what I do that for is if I allow authors to be able to see private posts I can tell a student if you market private in the WordPress multi-site now this will be seen only by your classmates like it was a blackboard discussion board or more of a closed LMS and if you choose to miss a unprivate now this is available to the entire community and so I'm trying to like I'm hacking the permissions a little bit to try to make both a real choice for closed versus open those kinds of tools like that ability to even you described it as a hack right but like but it isn't it isn't in that like it isn't it isn't there isn't like a built-in WordPress way to edit the user roles but there are a million plugins to do it and you could theoretically write your own if you really wanted to and that is one of the I think to me the most fascinating thing is that you can walk you can you can create that spectrum in a multi-site in almost any way you want and any way your students and faculty need in a way that would be you could do it in individual c panels but you would have to have like documentation about this is the plugins you need to install and you can actually make that pretty easy in a multi-site that's really fascinating to me and and even going the opposite way too like I know Tom in the WordPress multi-site workshop has mentioned a couple times how rampages has like a on the homepage like all blog posts that are public are just there that you can see I think that's maybe a feature of open lab too like bringing that content together into a network is doable because it's you know what one WordPress install with one database so that is I think one of the most cool things to me about multi-site is that you have that those tools to imagine almost any thing along that spectrum between nobody can see it and everybody can see it yeah I guess just to clarify all the students are in roles on the same single site I'm not modifying it so they can see their sites between different ones yeah but you could like technically you could do that if that's a thing you wanted and open lab does that you can you have five you have five security levels you can make it private just to admins private just to people with roles on the site private to the community world public world public and encouraged to be crawled on the robots txt file so that's the five levels that they built into their system and so what we do is we we push into the class we teach them about those levels of permissions and also bring a librarian with us who teaches them about creative commons licensing at the same time to try to think about how open should your work be and what are the implications of that yeah that's what i'm saying at that point it's really about getting people to understand the options they even have and probably landing on three four five good options and say these are the place these are the places we recommend you land right because when every choice is a choice that's obviously overwhelming or every choice is an option that's overwhelming but landing on a few that makes sense for your use case and then explaining them and what that means and what they may want to be considering is the conversations i love to see students have or be confronted with but have to be done well for them to mean anything i'm actually thinking we're going to be talking about site archiving soon maybe next week and i'm thinking about uh taylor you talked about you had a stream last week talking about flattening sites in general to static html um when i was wondering if anyone wanted to has done archiving work in a major sense or in a smaller sense on their wordpress multi site with the process for that look like n or i don't know multi site that would be interesting but i have done some archiving unfortunately ht track is not an approved tool that we can use at carlton i talked to our um security chief officer and he said that it's not something that we should use because it has vulnerabilities so he recommended site sucker and i'm a windows user so i i was so upset but well if you want help i can send you a special wget command that should work on windows so um we can talk about that in discord okay but um so yeah i've used a site sucker on my ipad to um flatten and archive um dynamic sites and send those to uh students who want a copy of their site i've also used web recorder on some very low um websites that don't have a lot of information um and i'm also working with our institutions archive commons librarians and they're using a tool called archive it um that they have their own um budget for and they it's a crawler that you can go through any site and direct it to go to additional domains um and so we're in the process of talking about how to archive institutional student work so that it is more accessible to students um when they want a copy of their site versus just emailing me saying that they want um their stuff archive it is the one that basically is the way back machine right yeah um it uses the way back machine but it um you can command it to crawl either um an automated annual process or just once and i from what i heard archive it um with their financial process they don't charge if you crawl the same site um over and over again they just do for new domains we have a process it's uh a very manual um because we have a lot of users um and we uh in our sites um in our system our maruti site and so what the system we have in place is that we go into our banner student information system database and we gather a um we basically get a csv file um of current students um and then we compare that to our users in wordpress and so the users that are no longer in wordpress are or you know know are that are still in wordpress but are no longer in our banner system had probably graduated so that we kind of have this manual system of weeding out those um users who are no longer at the university because we only support their wordpress sites while they're at um our university and so then we can take those to those users um um we don't i think no no no we just uh not delete them but we um that's the right word um we deactivate them i think is how i think it's what it is but then we take their sites and we actually export them as a zip file and put them on um on a separate server so or maybe we deactivate the sites anyway there's a whole process where we basically look at what students are still are still there and which ones are already left the university and we basically deactivate their sites if they come back to the university or want you know email us and want their site um carry on to another wordpress instant then we can we can give them that backup of their site and that's kind of how we do it is that did that answer your question sorry uh but answered sort of what i was curious about um definitely that that doesn't really manual and i'm but i if it works for you like i have not i need to confess that i have not had to do major archiving for a wordpress multi-site so mostly what i'm curious is just how people do it and how they think about those processes yes can i ask you lory what's what's in the zip file is it just the wp export is it all the media files does it have um i actually i try to grab everything um when we um let's see i think there's a plugin that allows you to grab the media as well because yeah if not when you just get the and this is the tricky part to me about exporting wordpress sites is that a lot of times it'll it'll link back to the original site um you know what i'm saying and so it's better to export the whole thing and to be honest with you i haven't done it in a while so i couldn't tell you exactly what all's in it but i i do try to get everything um so that it it links to the correct to the media that's in the backup that makes sense i i've definitely run into that too like you can use the built-in uh as a json file and if you're using that to like migrate like you're exporting that and installing wordpress someplace else and using that file now wordpress will offer to pull over media when you do that but of course the original has to exist for it to be able to do that um so that file on its own is just the text in your posts obviously so um uh you probably i don't know what plugin you use but i know some folks use updraft for that um and i think that works pretty well um and there's probably a lot of other options um and uh oh xml yes you're right um but uh yeah that that it can be a really tricky one um and i i always kind of feel like it's it's difficult i always have a hard time when because i had some some instances where folks will say i want a backup of my site and sometimes you have to kind of poke at that question a little bit and say well what do you what do you mean like what do you want here if i give you a database dump and the entire files all of the files that is a very complete backup but you may not be able to do anything with it right like depending on what you want to do maybe you want to look at it on your computer without publishing it anywhere and that will be tricky for i mean you can do it right but like that would be less useful than uh maybe a web recorder archive or something so that was always kind of a tricky thing so you have to land on one for a process right where you're archiving lots of sites but then every once in a while i get questions from individuals and i sort of eventually developed like a series of questions of like how do you want to view this and because it's it's tricky if you phrase it the wrong way people will say well i want to do all of those things and you go say well i'm willing to do one of them for you so you have to pick hey it's robin here um i'm just i'm just wondering if there is a way to automate like the archival process here a little bit so i mean lori mentioned that you know she does a manual process of when when a student is no longer at the university or college that they just manually do a backup of the site i'm wondering if there is some sort of plugin that will allow you to back up um their site like if it hasn't been touched in x amount of time um it probably means that they they're probably not here anymore i'm wondering if there is a tool that does that i'm not personally aware of one that would do one on a schedule like that but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist um you could theoretically kind of string a couple tools together because you can um you could via the database um and it would require a little bit of programming and stuff but you could theoretically look at the database and say like okay what should these sites haven't been updated since x day and then you know uh script that to do something but it would also be a little tricky because you'd also have to have some way to mark well we don't ever want to disable these sites right these are a textbook that hasn't been modified in four years but doesn't need to be modified every year or whatever uh obviously so it would be a little bit of a project but um but i think would be theoretically possible theoretically easier to do in multi-site than in like c-panel because it is sharing a database um but you have to be really careful with how you'd set that up i think there's also built in and it's a it's a strange tool but it is a just a button within your mode your network admin where you can click archive which will essentially take that site offline but keep the site as part of the WordPress multi-site so in some ways it's not making your database more efficient and but the site is offline but in terms of what it would look like to go in and um pull all the details from that site and archive it would be interesting so we're talking about flat files are we talking about pulling those the database and all that stuff so it's like a full-blown archive of that because the the WordPress multi-site database is structured differently right so you can get the core like tables but then the users is part of the global users so some of that would be custom but depending on whether you just want the flat files for that to live on whether you just want to have a dump of like here's an html version of the site that you can take with you you know professor x or student y or faculty member z and that would be something so depending on what you want there are different possibilities i do know that brad cos like in cold camp police back in the day at penn state did that like they built a tool that effectively took sites from their WordPress multi-site and packaged them up as html sites and said here you go here's an html export of all your stuff thanks for you shopping at psv blogs you know we'll see you later penn state's now campus press they don't they don't do much custom anymore that's right i added two plugins that i use in my multi-site one is and i use it in conjunction with the back you know the downloading a zip file of your site it's the export media library so that's the one that grabs the media of the the user in the in the actual backup and then the other one kind of goes to your question about how to know when the last time someone logged in or that sort of thing it's called wp last login and it's actually really helpful it shows up in your administration user screen so you can see when the last time someone actually logged in and and it and kind of helps you with cleaning up those user accounts that way who is going to unmute first that would be me yeah so we're coming up we have five minutes but i'd wonder anyone else who's here who manages a wordpress or like steve i know you talked about wanting to or thinking about bringing a wordpress multi-site and if you are coming here kind of with advice or for advice about wordpress multi-site like starting one i think a few people can attest to this here in this group like one of the things i love about wordpress multi-site is literally you can do it on shared hosting it's a very easy like change little change in the config and the network siding and you go from a single site to a full-blown multi-site and it doesn't have to be gigantic neither in scale right not until you get a ton of people publishing simultaneously so on a guy i know you were saying um you were or m i think you were saying you were thinking about doing one or maybe it's time to do one the nice thing about wordpress multi-site is it's really a very simple switch you flick in a single wordpress that allows you to have multiple users um and depending upon usage even if you do sub-sites sub-directories it's really like you don't have to worry about ssl search it's really simple so um if you're thinking about it and you want to experiment with something on campus it's great and easy the thing i would warn you about is it can't explode and people like oh great i have the service so then you have to like be in scale mode like okay it's getting bigger and it's successful which is good i know lori you can speak to the success you've had add many folks here robin but like if you're doing it it could be a very useful tool on campus so just be ready for that too when it starts to grow that there is but luckily i think it's manageable as a tool like even as a single admin i think if you can manage wordpress you're not that far away from being able to manage a full-blown wordpress multi-site for hundreds or even thousands of users so that's my advice steve if you're looking from other people here have a lot of great advice they've been through this but em if you're imagining this as a potential useful tool you've come to the right community with reclaim to get help along the way because it is a very i found it one of the most useful tools that we had on campus at my time as an ed tech far not so i would add one thing about starting a multi-site on your campus our multi-site is do not go crazy on a ton of themes keep it restricted just a few some simple ones and then some more that you know have more bells and whistles because i did that and then it was really hard to scale back and one thing we tell our users is that if you know oh i don't really like these themes they have the right to go get their own wordpress instance and load up whatever themes and plugins they want to so i mean that's the advice i'd give to you don't don't go overboard with plugins and things because you can really do it and get yourself in trouble oh yeah i have conversations with a couple of faculty and students who have their own wordpress sites and say be careful with the amount of plugins and themes you have in your wordpress instance one because it takes up storage second every wordpress plugin is an additional database that you add and i can also have vulnerabilities to it if it's not kept up by the developer and so the more plugins you have the more vulnerabilities you have and the more you have to upkeep your your website so i'm definitely in favor of keeping it low low stakes low scale only a couple things my question is if i do create this institution-wide wordpress site for e-portfolios and we have some existing e-portfolios for students and faculty that we can move i would need to create a redirection but does the site still the original sites still have to be active like the c-panel in which it was created in not for redirection as long as it's pointed as long as the actual domain is pointed to the right place then the c-panel shouldn't have anything to do with it it kind of it kind of depends right you need something to read like if you can do it in dns like you can point the domain to the that existed over here to the new multi-site you can totally map domains and that's super easy to do but if it's something like you want the new url like there is a new url say it's mycoolsite.com and we move it to mycoolsite.wordpressmulti-site.com and you want that to be the actual visible url and you don't want to map the domain sometimes there are times you want to do that you would probably need to keep the old c-panel in that instance but most the part you can you can map domains and multi-site there's ways to do that so then yeah we'll need a separate conversation for that yeah i would say also thinking about that and then thinking about what lori was saying bringing existing portfolios that people have already built out into a wordpress multi-site does prompt conversations about four people who have it installed all these plugins all these themes and who say hey no i want to keep this available you know just in case or no i'm still using this i want this to be part of the site that does mean pulling it into the wordpress multi-site and that does mean making it available for all of the users and thinking about what that ends up meaning for everybody and for you as an admin and long-term management yeah if they have any themes or plugins that they were using that they want keep those will have to be part yeah and also in my experience a lot of users would say well no it's not active right now i'm not using it right now but you know i might change my mind i want to keep it i was lori you mentioned like the conversation of like hey you know you can take when you outgrow what you can do here you can take it your site and move it to a different place like i always kind of loved those conversations because it was sort of like a hey your project is like lost outgrown this little garden right when now we need its own space you can do things with this like it can be kind of tricky or at least at least i always had anxiety around those when i first had those conversations of like they're gonna be mad or whatever that i can't help them but like it matters so much the tone right and say like okay we we can't offer that here but here are really good options this is where we can point you to get started here's how moving it would look you know or or maybe we'll help you with it depending on what you're able to offer um and a lot of times people were kind of excited to take that next step and say like oh and i'll be able to do like multiple sites if i want to and all this other stuff and obviously then you get in the hole not and not everyone wants that of course but um i was surprised at how often that was actually like a really like energizing interaction and not like uh i'm sorry i can't help you kind of thing yeah some people are also they shy away from a lot of options like if you are over ecstatic about all the things that they can do um then they become a little intimidated by all the options that they have and tend to shy away from exploration yeah it's a fine line right i mean i think making it simple too has its its real its real power i think that's why a lot of people kept with the classic editor and like you know it's five hundred five million active installs and then another million for the classic widgets like there's something happening there but i think beyond that one of the things i've been doing lately and it's very interesting as we talk about these legacy sites that have been going on for a while like lori you have one i know tom who was on here before have won many of us and you'll have one like one of the things i've really started to realize is i just did a couple of big migrations of big sites that had lived on spaces like rampages or umw blogs and it was cool like it can be work but it was cool to see like these sites that have lived on these environments for years now need another home for various reasons and i think the fact that these things get started as a part of a university effort to give people space to do this is no small kind of win in the work we do as a as you know as whatever we support at tech it like it was pretty cool to kind of see these faculty build these resources and be like i want it like i want it to live on and if it's not working here i need to move it somewhere else so you know there's a lot of good that comes out of it and years in the making i think which is cool but exporting wordpress we have a great guide on it but it is a different beast when you're going for wordpress multi site to a single site so keep that in mind as you do move people out um to keep all those database settings of the users there's a bit of juggling but it's not impossible and we can always help if you have questions we're uh like five minutes over so of course if everyone um people have to go um you can feel free uh i don't know um not that you were forced anyway um and uh so i'm gonna probably stick around as people trickle out but it was really great having the conversation i really appreciated talking to everyone hearing various different ways how people are using it what they're thinking about um this is awesome hope to see people uh future ones the recording of this will be posted it's in our it'll be in our community forum you'll see it there so um yeah thank you all i'm gonna stop recording now so