 I'm excited to be here with Tom today. I'm your rotating host, I guess. And we're going to talk a little bit, kind of elaborate on what you all laid the framework for in session talking about getting into the multi-site management, working with multi-site. We'll talk about some of the admin dashboard stuff, plugins, all that kind of stuff. And yeah, I'm really excited. Yeah, likewise. Good to see you, Taylor. So we're going to pull back for a second and just really not talk specifics about the server that you need, but kind of rough out some details that you want to consider when you're saying, hey, I want to work WordPress multi-site, or I've got a WordPress multi-site over here, and I need a better environment. So a couple things are worth considering right off the bat. And one of them is that educational installs like this don't necessarily behave or have the same concerns that a lot of commercial installs might have, where they're worried a whole lot about going viral and getting lots of views and that causing the server to go down. Whereas often that can happen, and that's a good problem to have, maybe, but often with educational servers like this or installs, your concern is more around like pulse authors, like it's 1150, the assignment is due at midnight, and you have a whole bunch of people start writing stuff. And that's a very different type of server load than what a lot of commercial places are used to dealing with. And we had that problem when we started rampages quite a bit, as they were built, where we originally hosted to deal with like millions of viewers and all that sort of stuff. But when we got to hundreds and thousands of users, writing at the same time like that was a big deal and caused us a lot of problems. That's a good point, because you're going to have a hard time finding information about that. Like when I've done, you know, some basic like, all right, like what are people looking for in terms of WordPress multi-site performance, it's always focused on viewership and never the writers. And they'll recommend things like aggressive caching plugins and stuff like that. And that can actually make things worse in some cases, if the problem is writers and not readers. Right. Yes, absolutely. And I think that's the thing is to realize to like, when you're running a WordPress multi-site environment, it's not like running a single install on a shared hosting environment. You're going to need a little more gas in the tank, a bigger engine, some of that stuff. So I think that's important. What you might see is what we had is like all sorts of errors, like database not responding or things just taking forever, even when you would just go into the back end stuff with drag. And, you know, just it was a miserable experience for everybody until we got that stuff straightened out. So you might see 500 errors. You know, you'll see timeout errors, things like that. I don't know if you have others that you see regularly, Taylor. I would say the most common one is that I see is the first one you mentioned with, if you look in like an error log, and it says like the database timed out or WordPress couldn't get a response from the database back fast enough. And it's kind of a scary one to see because people will say like, is there something wrong with the database? Is it corrupted or something? And almost every time it's just, well, no, like WordPress expects a response in a certain amount of time. The database was too busy, and it came back late. And so it was unhappy, basically, and it let you know, like, look, that took longer than we expected, and it made everything slow. So that's kind of what that errors most often getting to. And yeah, it's, it is interesting, because of course, like it comparing like WordPress multi site to demeanor one's own for a second, like, there's a lot of things going on in a whole C panel account. And so like, the amount of resources you may need for 500 people, let's say 500 people that are doing the same things in a C panel environment versus a single WordPress multi site, if there was also 500 people doing the same things would probably be lower. But the nature of how you use WordPress multi site does affect some of these things, like you typically have signups are relatively often relatively painless. Usually a lot of times people don't have to request, they can just kind of, as long as they have the right credentials, log in and do things. So sometimes the usage patterns are very different than demeanor one's own and do affect things like how much resources the server needs to have and how the database is set up and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. And in general, I mean, like anything you can do to reduce what I call pulse loads is always good, right? Because like even on single WordPress installs, I know you've all been at conferences where people are like, sign up on this side or everyone in the room, go visit this and you watch the thing collapse. Yeah. So I mean, like when you can, you spread that stuff out. And some of this is stuff you can control and some of it is stuff you can't. Because even when we do a course level kind of intros to even demeanor one's own stuff, we try and encourage people to sign up ahead of time rather than doing it right there in the classroom just because it spreads out the pulse load. And that's always a good idea. But a chunk of this is thinking long term. And you have a lot of flexibility now that you didn't in the old days when I started doing some of this stuff. Like we had to what they call shard the database for rampages, which is chunk it up in some really complex ways. So I think it either has 512 or 1024 database like tables all indexed in a bizarre way. So that makes everything a little bit harder and a little bit harder to navigate and a little bit more complex to move and just life is harder. But that was how we dealt with scaled in. And now you have, I believe a lot more flexibility in terms of being able to add on storage or split off the database into a separate kind of resource chunk. But Taylor, maybe you could talk a little bit about how you how you walk people through those considerations. Yeah. So typically, you know, as you said, like, you want to start with the long term think about, right, here's what we need right now. But don't think just end of the year think out a couple years. So you want to it kind of starts with goal setting, like we hope that it will see this type of usage. And we think that it will see that, you know, making those estimates, it's not always easy to do, especially before a project has started. But that's kind of where you need to start. It is way simpler to add more resources to an environment now. So while we do want to think that long term goal, there's there's no reason you have to like, plan for a disaster and say, All right, we think we need this much. So let's go twice as big as that. Like, that's probably not necessary. Usually, it's a matter of like, depending on how we're doing hosting, reclaim, like if we're doing it on the cloud, we have a lot of flexibility, and can add an even subtract resources from a server. But in most clouds, say like digital ocean, which we do post a lot of things there. And alternatives like AWS, usually resizing a server in terms of its capability is sort of one way. So you can go bigger, but you can't go smaller. And so that is attention, right, when you're planning long term, it's great that we can resize things pretty relatively simply. And in many cases with very little downtime too. But because you can't always go backwards, that like, I always try to encourage people like, look, I want you to plan ahead, but don't get too far ahead yourself, which is like, frankly, a confusing thing to say. So usually, we try to get from folks an idea of what they think their project is going to be size wise, we make some basic recommendations. And then say, and if we have any issues, we can always go to this larger size. And this is what that would cost. So that's, that's kind of how I encourage folks is, is have a goal in mind, make a reasonable estimate, you know, based on that goal, and then have a, all right, and if we need more performance, we can always go to here, because that is usually an option, but you can't normally go backwards very cleanly. If you have to go backwards and say, we're paying for too much. I don't know that that happens real often, right? I don't know why you commit to something that you can't pay for anyway, but you can do that. But it usually means migrating everything, you're setting up a new server and migrating it down. And that's, that's tricky, especially because typically for, for most of these, we don't need to do the like database sharding as much anymore, like that that's a that you can usually throw more resources at a multi site until we get to the absolute, you know, largest ones, in which case, there's probably still benefits of doing that kind of thing. But for most folks, it's not too difficult for us to resize a server. It's, it's literally getting, I think, to an understanding of for a customer of knowing that that is a possibility and may even be a necessity, depending on what their performance is. I think, especially with like hosting setups, there's always this kind of, you know, in a, in a case of like, like reclaim, you're paying for the server and then you're paying for our support. And those things are part of the package, but at some level, if the server is being too slow, and we've done it all we can do, we may be like, you need more server, right? Like, and now is that time that we talked about. So kind of being prepared for that possibility, I think just on the face of it is, is also a good thing. And, you know, having those conversations up front, so you can know, well, what would that cost? You know, like, what are we talking about? That's the thing I recommend not, there is no, in my experience, anyway, no, like, great math formula you can write to give you a perfect estimate of, of what you'll need because even based on users, like, as you said, it has a lot more to do with what those users are doing, idle sites and the WordPress multi site aren't the biggest of concerns performance wise. So it's, it's, are they writing, are they logging in, are they creating new sites, that kind of stuff, that's the heavy stuff. Yeah, that's a, that's a great point. Because, you know, while rampages has, you know, 37,000 sites and 35,000 users right now, like, the majority of those people are not active, many of them have graduated, but that too was part of the project plan initially was like all this stuff would be put on, and it would exist for ever unless the student wanted to remove it. And that's put us in a position long term, well, I'll say them now since I don't work there. But now they've got different leadership and they're trying to figure out like what to do with, you know, hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of files and, you know, how to bulk deactivate, like, lots of different sites. So yeah, and I do, I do want to mention one thing too, I like to draw the distinction for folks, especially if you haven't dealt with server stuff a lot to the distinction between, like, storage and performance, right, because just because you have a lot of stuff storage doesn't necessarily mean that that you will run into a performance problem. Usually, you're, you're wanting to keep your storage down just so that you don't have to pay for that storage on a monthly basis. And or it lets you do things more easily when you have to say you have to migrate. Well, that's stuff you have to bring with you, right. So it's good to consider that too, but that not necessarily the literal size of something has performance impact. Now, a large database can. So like, none of this is straightforward, of course. But I do, I do get that question a lot from folks and say, Hey, I have a not even talking multi site for a second. Hey, I've got a WordPress site. It's got it's 40 gigs of stuff. And I was like, a lot of pictures. And they're like, Yeah, I was like, Well, that's probably fine. I mean, is hopefully it's performing well. But like, there's an inherently something wrong with that unless you're noticing, hey, it's paid to just load a load in which case it maybe resize those pictures. But so there's storage and performance can be linked, but are often related, but not actually causing, you know, performance issues. So yeah, absolutely. So less, don't think of it like a hoarder's house where eventually, you know, all this stuff is caving in on you, but it's more like, it's an orderly thing and all the stuff is stuck, you know, in drawers. It's a warehouse, right? Like it's a warehouse. So you need to plan and say, Hey, we need a warehouse this big. And as long as we're fine with that, we're fine with that. But we can manage the warehouse, you know, like it's, it's, it's, it's a part of the conversation, but it isn't inherently a bad thing, I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, I'm with you. So, you know, those are all things that you want to kind of keep thinking through and have be part of your core planning. And I think the other thing is maybe reserve a little bit of money. If you're in like, you know, a place that does like, we only are going to give you more money at these, you know, yearly intervals. Never a bad idea to have a little padding in that budget so that you have some readily accessible funds if you want to expand stuff. So it's something to think about too in the cycle of, of your project is like, when do you get money? If you need extra money to expand things, can you do that readily? Are you at a state institution? And that requires like, you know, the world to be moved, like those are, those are parts of your consideration. So being at a private place after being at a state institution, I constantly feel like I'm breaking the law because they have so much flexibility in terms of how they spend money. I, coming from a private institution, having never worked in a state institution, I have coworkers I still talk to, or old coworkers I still talk to once in a while and they'll say something like, it's taking a long time to do this. I was like, you've no idea. Trust me. Just be careful about who you say that around. Okay. Cause like every place is different. There's a lot of places that have it worse. Absolutely. Well, what I thought we might look at a little bit today is maybe the impact of some of the plugins and a little bit deeper dive into the WordPress dashboard. So for WordPress multi site, we'll take a little look here at the dashboard and some of the options we have just to make sure, you know, this will be a little bit of, you know, minor rehash of some of the stuff we probably covered in the last episode, but not in any significant way. So I am already here in network admin. I'm at the dashboard and you see I can kind of jump through things here. That's the extra piece. And if you're used to single sites like this will throw you off initially, that this is where you go to add themes and plugins, et cetera. But you'll get used to it pretty quickly. So I want to take a little look at sites here just to reemphasize this because it's different. So I'll show you a couple things real quick. So one is that if I hover over the admin, the edit piece, the edit link here down at the bottom left in the tiny, tiny font down there, it will tell me the ID of the site. Now, you can do some things like if you customize it, you can put the ID of the site in this dashboard view as well. It's not that big a deal, but this is how you would know that the Koga site is the ID 10 and that matters because here's the database and I have wp underscore 10 options and you'll notice this is the Koga stuff. So that's why you might want to know that ID. It's handy to know for other stuff like if you have to dig into the database or something. Life goes well. You probably never have to look at that database. It's way simpler to do it that way though. The first time I had to do something like that, I didn't think of IDs for whatever reason. I searched through the database to find the URL, not manually, but it was way simpler to pull the ID like you showed. Yeah, and that's a handy thing and there's little stuff like that. It's the same thing like if you're editing posts and you do that, you'll see the ID of the poster page. So just remember WordPress will help you out, but sometimes it's like it whispers a little secret in a place that you will not be looking. The other thing I just want to take note of again here is that you can do some stuff here. Like you can hop directly to the dashboard of that site and since you're a super admin, you don't have to add yourself as a user. You don't have to do anything weird there. You don't have to go through cPanel. Bam, you're in the place and you can do the stuff. I can deactivate archives, spam that, hopefully you'll never have to do it and you can even delete it there. Visit will get you to the front. Can you kind of quickly just mention the difference between deactivate archives, spam and delete, I think is relatively straightforward. Right. I think when you spam it, you're both kind of deregistering it and I think it does some extra stuff based on the idea that the person who created it is also spammed, but I'm not 100% on that. We had a tiny bit of issue here when initially when we set up, but by restricting by domains and things, we never had any other spam issues. So I never had calls to use it and we went with kind of burn it with fire deletions because we weren't even really interested in doing any. It's kind of like marking email with spam. I think it does some stuff to build up a database. You know what I mean? And that's the one I'm also not very familiar with because again, like most of our, we don't have very many WordPress multi-sites. We support that literally anyone can go and sign up to make a site. Those are not very common. Usually it's at least behind an email domain from a school or single, most oftenly single sign-on. So yeah, that one I haven't used much myself. And I think deactivation is like on the scale of I guess severity deactivation I think is the least severe and the easiest to kind of reactivate. We didn't do a whole lot of this either just because we didn't have calls. And the same thing with archive for us at least, like to me these are in-between things like and usually associated with paid sites. Like if you had a paid account on a WordPress multi-site and you didn't pay for a month and somebody wanted to deactivate and kind of hold it, I think that's more along the line to what you would do. In our case, if we're getting ready, we tend to be pretty serious about it. And so we are deleting usually based on user requests. In our case, they're like, hey, I don't want that site to be visible anymore. And we had a handful of those over the year or somebody years where somebody would write back and just say like, I don't want, I don't want my stuff online anymore. Can you can you cleanse it with fire and we would show so. The other thing here that you want to take note of is this edit button, right? And this is where you can change the URL really directly. So that will inevitably come up. Again, like and another thing we didn't use, which was mature and that impacts like some searching settings and just whatever. I doubt that any of our people have to do that. Users. Notice that I did put a little CSS and style bot in here to blur this stuff because some of these things are real. But that was the idea I came up with the last second. So I'll write a little blog post on that. But it blurs some things. That's cool for demo. And you can control the users here, you know, and do some nice things. You want to remove it. You want to send them a password reset. Now, the only thing I'd say here is like chances are if they're not getting your password reset emails, sending it again isn't going to help you. So, you know, there's depending on your institution and how friendly they want to be to you. This can be a real hassle. So, you know, it's hard to hard to make clean suggestions for how to fix this. What I have found though is customizing the emails in different ways can sometimes change how filters treat them. And there are a variety of ways you can customize WordPress emails that go out like the password one and things like that. Because a lot of places get nervous when a site sends an email that says something about passwords, right? They assume that's phishing or spam. The other big one that happens too is if the WordPress site is attempting to look like it's sending mail from a school's domain, like, you know, school.edu. And so either modifying that so it doesn't look like that or using an SMTP plugin to actually route the mail through the school's mail servers is another option. There's, we do have an article that will link on recommended plugins. And one of them in there is an SMTP plugin that we've, that folks have used to help with that kind of thing. Honestly, I'm a big fan though of, like, if your WordPress multi site is, you know, school multisite.com and not under.edu to just have its mail send from that instead. And that often is enough to help. But yeah. Yeah. With VCU, I changed password to magic, magic, something like magic word. And that actually got it through our filter. And sometimes you can coordinate with IT on it too. Sometimes you can say, Hey, like, is there any way we can whitelist email from this domain? If it uses these words, because it's often a little bit more tricky than we want a whitelist email from a domain, because right, anybody can email is, you can, you can tell an email server to say it is someone else. So then you're opening your own multi site up for maybe phishing, you know, which you don't really want. So, so, but, but often there are ways to do that based on the, you know, and there's also DNS stuff too, that helps with this too, that is a little bit beyond my knowledge, but you know, like the right records in there that can help with spam stuff that we also can help with too. So right, right. Because yeah, IT will be like, well, what's the IP address range that those emails will be coming from is often a question that gets asked around whitelisting things. And, you know, so it is an ongoing conversation. In any case, like, the reason I like to show this is just because efficiency. You know, for a long time, I was the main soul support and not my sole job for this. So I looked for lots of ways I could do things quickly. And even if you save yourself the time of hopping over to the site, then going to users, which you can also do, like this is just a hand here faster way to do it. And again, like themes, right, I have most of the themes on here, I don't know, I have like 100 themes probably on this little local dev thing. But two of them are not network enabled. And that's why they show up here. And so this is the way you can singly activate themes for individual sites. And again, the reason that you might do that is like, maybe that theme is built for a very specific purpose. And no one else really should just be randomly choosing it. Or it's a theme that you paid for and you have one license. And that's all you got. Those are two scenarios, certainly. I was going to ask with the paid one, because I haven't run into that as much in a multi site scenario. Do in your experience, do paid themes work okay in multi sites like this? Like in the context of like they, I guess my natural inclination is that maybe they wouldn't understand the licensing model properly, but it works fine if you can do an individual site license like that. Yes. And, you know, for, I don't know that anyone would want to, certainly, but I mean, you can network activate the paid themes. And a lot of times, you know, unless they're pretty fancy, they can't realize that it's a WordPress multi site. Now, some do some plugins do and some plugins don't function well at network activation. Beaver Builder was initially like that. It had a lot of problems with network activation. You know, this is years ago, but you know, you can see different issues there. So you want to make sure that if you're planning to network activate it, that you have, you know, either ask them or you see that that it does work at that network level. Yeah, the plugins stuff can be tricky. And unfortunately, it's not always super well documented. So sometimes, sometimes I'm, you got to be really careful with those, because obviously the risk is higher, right? You're not taking down one site for a little while, you're taking down everybody's site for a little while. So yeah, I'm always a little bit more choosy about that stuff. And also, again, you know, just keeping in mind too that the, you know, you're everyone will need to ask you for any plugin they want. So you want to be choosy from that aspect too. How many plugins do you want to install and support in some way? So well, it's maybe a good time to talk about that a little bit is you do have to think about the overall complexity here, right? Like I started to try and figure out the math to be like, if you give them 100 themes and 80 plugins, like how many possible combinations are there? And short answer is there are a lot. There are many combinations. Yeah. And, you know, you're not going to be able to test this stuff, you know, super, super rigorously. Once you have any degree of scale and complexity in your system. So a lot of times what we would do is we would pick out a couple things. We would look for high profile sites, like what are our either big view or tied to important things or even tied to people who get the angriest, right? So I'd have a list of that's just pragmatic right there. Yeah. Yeah. For real. Like, because like I said, like it was all about making my life more pleasant. And, you know, so that was one chunk of them. And the other chunk would be like, all right, what are our more complex sites? You know, they either have a lot of plugins or like they're just trying to do a lot of stuff. So I'd have a list of, you know, 10 or 15. Because really you're not, you're just not going to, unless you've got multiple dedicated people, you're not going to be able to do like really super extensive testing. So yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. And especially there's always, I think sometimes folks will encounter that and then go, okay, well, so that means we're going to have two themes. Right. And then, I mean, you can do that. But in my experience, that it's not really going to save you. Well, it'll save you, I guess, support time. But what will happen is people won't use it. Right. And then you haven't really solved anything. Right. So it's a tricky balance. I always like to encourage folks to be picking plugins that are popular, right, that have a lot of installations that are from companies that maybe have a presence and a reason to keep them updated, you know, if that's an option. And likewise with themes too, right, like, like, look at themes. I don't just look at ones that say that they support the current version of WordPress. I like to look and see how often themes have been updated. Are they getting updates like monthly or particularly plugins? Just to give you some indication of, yeah, they're checking in, they're doing bug fixes regularly. Right. And you look at the support kind of realm and if they're on the WordPress site and see, because sometimes it's like, hasn't been updated in the last three versions or for three years, but it is actively supported in that area. And I mean, to be frank, sometimes things just don't need to be updated and they just keep working. And you may see that with a number of the multi site plugins, I think, because they tend to act at more of a core level. So it doesn't matter that Gutenberg exists in lots of those things. It's dealing with a very different side of WordPress. And so that is a thing that may or may not be true, but I think it is. Yeah, I, yeah, totally. I don't want to give the impression that I would throw out any plugin that doesn't, but it's sort of like, if you've not heard and you're looking, that's one way to look at it, but not the only way. I mean, there's plugins are, yeah, they're all different. I mean, like there's, and also looking at the simple, like the complexity of what you're asking it to do, I think has a lot to do with that too. So if you're using a plugin that, you know, say just does something simple, like expose a new option in the admin dashboard for you, or, you know, then maybe, maybe that's not that, but I guess it's sort of depends on what that option does. But right, like I'm struggling to come up with a good example to top my head, but there are, there are definitely cases where you would want to pay more attention to that support and updates story than others. I guess maybe the most extreme option is like, I have some plugins that I install that are really just like tiny snippets of PHP that I use often. And no, I don't update mine very often because they only have like two lines of code. And all they do is things like add a single box of text to the dashboard, right, like this. So if what you're looking for is pretty simple, it's the risk is lower probably. Yeah, absolutely. And I think what you said about like, you know, I think it's worth investing in certain paid plugins, you know, do it, do it cautiously, do it understanding that it's not a guarantee for forever. Like, I know a number of people probably bought in the WordPress multi site plugins, the WPMU dev plugins, like back in the day, and they had a certain point just said like, we quit. We're not doing any of these plugins anymore. And they're all open source now. So you can continue to modify them and stuff. But even though you were paying for it, it was a pretty decent amount of money yearly, like those things are kind of on their own now. And that happens. It happened to us with themes. I do tend to encourage people to steer clear of the freemium ones, because they're usually just good enough to make people angry that you haven't paid for it. So, you know, keep that in mind. You know, and it's also part of your budget considerations. You know, are you going to be able to keep this up? Because most of them are subscription, you know, year after year now, like, are you going to be able to do that? If you can get in and buy something at the one time forever for as many sites as you want level. A lot of times that's worth it with any sort of reputable plugin, you know, want to give somebody a boost right before they quit. But yeah, the tricky thing is that like that. And that I think that's a smart move to do. But again, like they're obviously there's no guarantees, right? Like it's right. It's lifetime of the development of the plugin is what you're paying for, right? And there there definitely have been cases to like I remember the first I think the first paid WordPress plugin I ever bought was not technically a subscription, but like you got to get you got to look at like what they mean by support, right? Like support often includes updates. So it's like, yes, you pay for this one time and they'll even advertise it's a one time payment. And it includes a year of support. And I was looking at that going, great, I don't think I really need support on this. And then it's like, yeah, that includes updates. So after a year, it won't update anymore. And that may be okay for a while, right? Like, but you got to and you got to be careful because you don't want to be stuck with folks depending on especially in a multi site context, depending on a plugin that you once paid for no longer you're paying for. And so it's stuck on this old version. And maybe that's okay, but you don't want it to be part of someone's workflow and then have to yank it from them later. Well, that is like I try and be really explicit about that and really reinforce it with my individual conversations. But you want it to be part of your sign up process to and kind of be like set the expectations for this environment. Like a lot of times in education, we're like always in forever 100% uptime. If that's what this is, then you need to think about a lot of these things in a different way. And you got to be like, all right, we can't sunset this, we can't do whatever, we have to figure about carrying this load forever. Kind of the Microsoft model, I would say versus the Apple model, which is the Apple model, like at a certain point, they're just like, well, the future is different. And that is going to go away now. So suck lemons if you don't like it. This is what we're doing. And there's maybe an in between there and I may be overstated, but like try and get that across this thing. You know, we're going to keep it up. It's worth, it's reliable, but like, you know, this is not Blackboard or something like that. Or even that goes down when you have millions and millions of dollars and all these people, like try and set those expectations, try and build a culture around this in the way that kind of supports the kind of stuff you want to do. Is this a place for innovation? In which case stuff is going to shift. Occasionally things may have problems. We'll do our best to help you. You know, that kind of mentality as opposed to, you know, just like nothing changes. You know, we only do updates every four years after this sort of thing. Like we were pretty aggressive on updates. And we did kind of that similar testing pattern. We had a dev environment. We'd run our updates. We'd check a couple sites. Everything seems all right. We'd move forward. Then, you know, every once in a while, somebody'd be like, oh, my so-and-so doesn't work anymore. And we'd check it out. And sometimes we had to say like, that theme is now toast. And we'd remove it from the thing and say like, we'll help you find another theme. But we were moving on like that thing's no good. We're not going to fix it or undo an update to try and deal with that. Yeah. Yeah. So a little bit different and, you know, but part of setting the policy and understanding stuff that is part of establishing a project. Now, to run us back to like something like, hey, show me what the clicking looks like. This is settings. And it's essentially a kind of a window into that database table that I just showed you now hours ago after all that talking. But this is a lot of the more usable or user accessible stuff. But I'll show you like you can change different things. You could put custom URLs in here. The stuff I want you to see is stuff like this. Whenever you see serialized data, that means you can't edit it here. It's editable in the database if you want to mess with that. But like this is really stuff that's easy to mess up by hand. You'll see a lot of curly brackets and colons and weird stuff. And it is writable, but like it begs you to make typos. And then you just look at it and go like, what in the world have I done wrong? So that's, they definitely don't want anyone's like browser auto fill put in junk in there. Right. And this is a place though that you can change some stuff, especially if something gets stuck. You could come in here and erase some things. You could erase some things in the database. Like if you can't get into the dashboard for some reason, this is often a place to go where maybe you can just make the change here and kick things through. But there are lots of options. And you can tell like if you turn on certain plugins, there are even more options. Like this is relevancy or relevancy, I'll resay it, which is like a short search indexing thing. And then this is a plugin that I've often encouraged with education sites called more privacy options. And we'll have a link to it and things like that. But in addition to being able to see this in the reading aspect of the individual site, it gives you more options as a user when you sign up to say, Hey, I want a regular site that's visible or I want a site that's visible to anyone with the link, but I don't want Google and normal search engines index it. Or you can kind of work your way through here to say like, Oh, if they're a member of the multi site, they can see my site, but none of the general public can. And then finally site members or site admins. I've never really seen much purpose to the site admins part. But, you know, that's that's kind of your graduated scale of increasing privacy. Yeah, it's cool. So they can set that on sign up, you said. Yes. So that puts itself in the sign up form somewhere. Yes. Yeah, let's let's take a look at that real quick. I think it's part of rampages. So let me take this partially through. And then there we go. It kind of kicks it in here. And you have that option. Now, as we look at kind of sign up processes, like this is a semi customized one. Let's look at this is a regular sign up, right? I'm just regular WordPress multi site, nobody press, no, nothing. Where you say, Hey, is what I want. Remember if I said any restrictions on email. You see I'm. All right, there we go. And so, you know, you can kind of see what that process feels like. And it looks like, you know, by default, it only give you one privacy option, which is index or not. Now it's also important. Like this is part two of like how education works and how you're building the culture. Like, you know, how do people know how private that really means, you know, like, so there's some things that you can do to kind of help people understand the choices they're making. Yeah, this is always, if you have the opportunity, I think this is always a great place to talk about, like with, with folks like URLs and, you know, I always make the comparison to like unlisted YouTube videos, books say like, yeah, it's unlisted. And I actually think it's a decent word for it in that it's not private, right? It's a URL that you probably can't guess easily. But, but if it gets shared, it is not private at all. And obviously with this, there's a lot, there's more facets to what's possible. So I think even documenting that is probably good as well as explaining it, because you can explain it and then folks will inevitably kind of forget the details of how that actually works. So yeah, I think both is good when possible. Do you know if the users can change that setting after they've signed up? Or is that something your admins can do? Okay, yeah, they can change it. And they will. And they'll also do this wrong in lots of ways, depending on their goals. So I mean, it adds a little bit of a support headache for you. But like, it's a pretty standard response where you go, click here, look at these, make the choice you want, hit save. And then it explains the choices. Some place I have like our WordPress privacy, like gradations of consideration where it's like, do you want to be pseudonymous? Consider your display name. Consider your URL. And it kind of walks you through different aspects of the privacy spectrum and things that you might want to do down to these settings. So I think it's a great time and place to talk people through that. And you're going to want to have some solid documentation around it. And there are lots of people that have done it that you don't have to kind of start from scratch. So just as another example, this is a WordPress multi site with buddy press activated. And it's, it just feels a little bit different. Like you can kind of already see it's a lot more oriented towards creating a more robust profile, like right off the bat. And you can customize all that sort of stuff. But you see like, it's just, it's just a little bit different. And then with rampages, as I said, we customized this on top of buddy press to be more like the old sign up, because that's what, what, what we wanted to do. But we put in little pieces like this, like we had people keep trying to sign up for new accounts when really they just wanted a new site, because they didn't understand in WordPress multi site. If you leave it open, I can create as many sites as I want. Sure. Which is a thing you know, if you know it, but if you don't know it, you know, it's, it's not that obvious. It would be interesting too. I think it would be possible, but like to explore having like a, like a wizard style workflow, right? Like you could use a gravity form to yes, have a like, do you already have an account kind of thing. Great. Then what you need to do is click this, and that'll take you to the right spot, or that kind of stuff. And in that, I'm just saying like in front of the process, obviously, with a little bit of work, you could do, you can actually use gravity forms to handle the sign up process too. There's a lot of different paths there, but sometimes I kind of like the bolted on like this is an automated help system kind of thing, which is just like, yeah, if you don't know what to do, click this and we'll walk you through the three things that you're probably looking for, you know, which can be a helpful, but be less work than like rolling your own login or rolling your own sign up process. So yeah, just keeping in mind that you can just chain WordPress pages with buttons at the bottom, you know, that give you choices just like a choose your own adventure type deal, like, hell, you could build it in twine if you want to. So, you know, you do have those options and you can make this as complex or as simple as it needs to be for you. And it can be a mix of, I think, informative and filling out stuff. And we've done that in a lot of different ways over the years, like, you know, to do syndication sites and to help people understand what, you know, RSS feeds are and like there's lots of fun stuff you can do to contextualize it using the very tool that you're you're signing up for. And I think that is inherently valuable and good. It'd be a great place to do the privacy conversation as people start to sign up, you know, give them some education, show them examples, help them really understand what it is that they're doing, make it the exact opposite of the typical kind of eula ingredient, you know, agreement, the checkbox that you never read, make it simple, make it understandable, make it a kind of pleasant and interesting experience. But I don't think we're going to dip into buddy press in the two minutes that we have remaining, but, you know, it has its own set of settings, you know, where you can customize lots of stuff. And as I said, this is one of the major ones at Seabox and the commons and all that stuff is built on top of that further kind of expands things. But buddy press really makes the multi site a lot more social with like activity streams from across all the sites, you know, comments are mixed in with all that stuff. I used to just go to the rampage's recent activity and just go through it to see what was happening. And that's super cool that you can do that. You just also want to be aware that it brings in different load stuff for the server and concerns like that. At least back in the day, it also had privacy concerns because the privacy plug in and buddy press, yeah. They didn't talk as well together as they might have. I think that got fixed, but I'd need to verify on a fresh install, but we found some work arounds and made it work in the end. But this is all part of how this stuff starts to stack together and you can constantly see from our conversation how we go back and forth. What are our goals? What are the technology? What about our goals and the technology and how we're educating how that works with workflows? So I mean, there's this constant back and forth trifecta kind of constantly revising and changing and building to kind of suit your needs and goals. So expect it to be organic and to continue to grow no matter how good you are at planning things. This will continue to shift in an organic and exciting way. And I think it's a lot of fun to do that, but you want to make sure that you realize that is going to happen. Awesome. Well, I think that's a pretty good session. I think we'll kind of cap it off there. But thanks, Tom. I think I hope folks got a lot to think about, especially if they're new or thinking about starting a multi-site. I always love these conversations that link that what can we do to what do we want to do? Like you said, bouncing back between goals and sort of like execution of the tech. So it's always good stuff. I'll make sure that we have that blog post because we did mention a couple of plugins and we have an article that lists all of those, I think, actually, that we can get linked. And we'll see everybody next time.