 All right. Welcome, folks. If you are joining us from wherever you are joining us, if you are joining us, he says, I mean, of course, people are joining. That's why they're in the room. It is starting to get cold in Cape Town. So my brain is not functioning 100% lately. So I apologize for that. But as you're joining, if you'd like to let us know in the chat where you are joining us from. It's always interesting to see folks where they're from in the world and maybe let us know what time it is there where you are and what the weather is looking like. Cape Town is cold and wet today. So we're starting to see winter coming around. Patricia is from Geneva, Switzerland. And it's the same time in Geneva as it is here. It's always fun when I meet folks in Europe who are on a similar time zone. I see some familiar faces there. Arta from Germany. Welcome. Larry from Texas. Welcome. Valerie from OK, which I'm going to assume is Oklahoma. Welcome, Valerie. Right. Okay, so while while folks are joining and letting us know where they're from. Hi there, Shabam from India 730 there. I appreciate you being online so late this evening. Today's session is going to be the first of a few sessions over the next few weeks that have to do with with WordPress multi sites. WordPress multi sites or a multi site network is something that I've had a fair amount of experience with. It's not been my primary level of experience but I have done some work on multi site networks as a developer, specifically creating either specifically a theme or a child theme for a multi site network and I'll dive into that in a second to see how that worked when we go over the examples and also working as a plugin developer having to take into account whether a plugin is on a multi site network or not. One of the first times that I heard about WordPress multi site was when I was developing my one of my very first plugins. Valerie says okay okay cool. That's pretty that's pretty cool. And one of the first support questions that I ever had was does the support multi site. And I had to go and do some digging into how to make a plug in support multi site. So today we're going to start looking at what a multi site network is how to set one up. And then over the next few series. And then we can look at developing for multi site specifically thinking about multi site networks. So today is going to be a little bit less of the coding side of things and more of me discussing things and talking about things and sharing some sort of background for those who don't know what multi site is. And then we're just going to go through through some steps. So I will introduce myself very quickly. My name is Jonathan as I may have mentioned earlier I'm not sure now I can't remember for those of you don't know me I'm from Cape Town in South Africa. I am a developer educator at automatic and I'm sponsored to work with the training team. A few announcements before we get going as always. First of all welcome to everybody joining us today and welcome and thank you to Thelma who is co hosting with me here today. It's always always a pleasure to have Thelma here. Thelma is a fellow fellow automatician and a fellow living in South African. But Thelma is originally from Zimbabwe from the second. Yeah. Okay, I'm actually in her right now. Oh, you're in her right now. Oh, sorry. I thought you were sitting in Cape Town. My apologies. Okay, so Thelma is a Zimbabwean. I apologize living in Zimbabwe at the moment living in Harare. Sorry. I thought you were still living in Cape Town. No, it's okay. I'm always so I get the confusion. Okay. Okay. As we as we go on if you can't see what's on screen while we're presenting please do let me or Thelma know. And we will there is a bug that we picked up specifically with folks joining from Linux workstations. So if you ever can't see what I'm sharing on screen please let me know and what we just do is we reset the screen share and that usually fixes fixes things. I just want to, yeah, okay. As always we are presenting in focus mode but if you would like to you're welcome to enable your video focus mode just means that. Okay, Victor says he can't see so that's perfect that's exactly what I need to know so let me stop the screen share. If I can remember how that works. Oh wait hang on maybe I haven't actually shared the screen. I'm sure so let's stop the share there we go. And let me close on whatever that window was and let me screen share again. Things of things are not doing what I'm used to them doing. So there we go. Apologies for that right so Victor can I just confirm that you can see the announcement slide right now. If you can confirm that for me that'll be great. And then we'll be able to to move on. Okay, Adrian can see it. While I'm waiting for Victor respond Victor is from Buenos Aires Victor says you can see it excellent. Valerie's only okay from stored. Okay. Okay from stored. Okay, great. Okay we're all caught up. So yes that is that is something we picked up a while back that if you are joining from a Linux workstation if the if you join the zoom chat. The zoom meeting after the screen share has been enabled, then you might not see it so if you're joining any other online workshops that are hosted using zoom. And you can't see it just let the speaker know that they just need to disable and reenable screen share and that fixes the problem. Cool you're all you're as always you are welcome to ask questions at any point in time. You're welcome to post questions in the chat and mute to ask questions. Today is not going to be such a code heavy session so I while I will still leave breaks for specific questions you are welcome to ask me as we're going along it's going to be a little bit more of a conversation today, but more of a chat as opposed to a code heavy session. So you are always welcome to ask questions at any point in time. Lisa says wasn't able to download the slides. So the slides are usually shared on slide share. And if I didn't, let me just check if I pasted the right link or not. Did I not paste that I apologize if I didn't. I thought I had but it's very possible that I hadn't because sometimes I create things and then don't hit post. So let me go to the meetup page quickly and check that. That's embarrassing I posted the message but not the actual link to the slides my apologies. So while you're here with me we can go and get those very quickly. That's rather as you can see this Cape Town this winter weather in Cape Town is affecting my brain. So let me find those slides very quickly. Let's take a sharing button here. There we go. And let me grab the link. And I'll copy that and then I will go back to the meetup URL and I will reply and post them there so that folks can get them there and I will post them in the chat. So that everybody can get them there. There we go. Okay. I apologize for that folks. The slides aren't super super important today but you're welcome to download them now or later if you would like to. Okay, no problem. Okay. Right, then if you do want to work along with me today please make sure your local install is ready. There is a caveat to that statement which I will get to in a second. So depending on what local environment you're using might determine how the workshop stuff is slightly for you. I'm going to try and cover all of the options I can think of. But if you are going to work along with me today have your local WordPress install ready. I do recommend having a clean WordPress install ready because that's the way to set up a multi site which we will chat about in a second. But if you want to have that up and running do that mean to have that ready. As always, if I'm going to fast which I do tend to do please do let me know either in the chat or raise your hand in the in the zoom emotions or just, you know unmute and say hey Jonathan slow down. I will do my best to stay as measured as I possibly can. And then finally, I will be posting the session to WordPress dot TV afterwards I am recording. Yes, I am recording. So you'll be able to get it there if you want to watch it later, or for anybody who wants to you couldn't make it today will be able to watch it there. All right, our learning outcomes today we're going to focus on what is a multi site network so if you've never heard of multi site today. I'm going to try and do my best to give you a short introduction to a multi site network and why it could be useful for a future project. I'll talk about why you might consider using a multi site network and under what circumstances you might consider doing that. I'll then show you some examples of multi site network specifically projects that I've worked on one very big one that I work on every day, which some of you may guess. And then a few others that I've worked on in the past and I'll chat briefly about what I did on those projects and why I thought they were interesting. And then lastly we'll go through the steps of setting up a multi site network yourself. So those are all the announcements and the things that we need to cover today I just want to before I get started just want to check if anybody has any questions or anything else they want to let me know that they can't see if they need access to before we get started. I'm just going to check the chat and make sure I didn't miss any comments or anything. I think it was just slides. Victor was saying he's from Buenos Aires. Okay, so Valerie was saying okey okey from Muskegee Oklahoma. Okay. Right. Got that. All right, I think we're all caught up there. So that's great. Okay. So, first question of the day, what is a multi site network. And the great thing about WordPress is that it has a documentation page. So the article that I was mentioning, or at least the documentation that I was mentioning is this one over here. I will share this in the chat. Once I have opened it up so that you're welcome to open it up as well on your side. But this is a article in the WordPress documentation that talks about how you create a network. And you'll often see it is referred to as a multi site network or just multi site or a network of sites. And you'll see that on this page is referred to as a network and it says you have the ability to create a network of sites using the multi site feature. So, I am not so I'm going to go back to Eleanor's question about could you explain the minimum hardware requirements to create a multi site network. My understanding. And if you read I'm not going to read through this whole document now but if you read through this document there is this before you create a network link as well which is also linked in my slides will open that up. And I will copy and paste that for you in the chat as well. There are specifically under the server requirements section they don't talk specifically about anything to do with the hardware itself. So theoretically, you can run a multi site network on whatever type of setup you could run a single site or a single install or a standard install a WordPress on. However, when we dive into multi sites in a second we talk about what it is and how it works we need to remember that a multi site network is effectively a collection of websites. And so the more websites that you have on your hosting account or your hosting package or whatever the case may be the higher your requirements are going to be because you're going to have maybe more people hitting your site. All things happening things happening across the network and those kind of things so the minimum requirements are exactly the same as the minimum requirements for WordPress. But as your site scales you might need to update and increase your requirements as as you move along but in terms of minimum requirements, they are whatever the requirements offer WordPress itself, which we can find on the WordPress website under. I think it's under get WordPress somewhere. They talk about the minimum requirements that might be installation. It's been a while since I've looked for this, this piece of documentation. Let me just. Here we go. So the requirements on the server side are PHP 7.4 greater my SQL 5.7 or greater and HTTPS support and those are the minimum requirements in terms of hardware itself. I mean, I have I've run WordPress sites on shared hosting. I've run WordPress sites on Digital Ocean. It doesn't need much to get going, you know, it requires very little in terms of in terms of sort of minimum requirements. But obviously, again, the bigger your site gets the higher the traffic is the more you need memory and CPU cycles and all that kind of thing but those are the minimum requirements. Okay. So the important thing to understand about a multi site network is that it is a collection of sites so multiple different WordPress sites but it uses the same core WordPress files. So it uses the same admin files the same WP include files those of you join me on our walk through the WordPress lifecycle last week we looked through the config and then the includes and the blog header and all of those. It uses all of those same same local files. The difference is is that once it's installed an active it sets up a few extra tables in the database. And there are a few extra things that you set up yourself in the config file if you're doing it yourself. And you can then run multiple WordPress sites on a single install. One of the very first sort of projects that I tried to kick off. When I became when I when I sort of went from being employed to being a freelance developer was I set up something called side websites, which was a very simple WordPress multi sites install that I set up and I enabled folks to create their own websites. And it was just my kind of way of trying to get into sort of letting people easily create sites for themselves who weren't technically minded. It was my sort of initial attempt at you know being an entrepreneur, but you will see on this document talks about the fact that a multi site network can be very similar to your own personal version of WordPress.com. If you don't know WordPress.com is the is the service that automatic hosts to set up WordPress sites and that effect that effectively is just one big multi site install. With a multi site, you can enable it so that end users can get your domain your top level domain whatever the case may be, and then register their own sites inside of your multi site network, or you can switch that setting off and you can only register your sites as admin as as an administrator user. All sites on a multi site network can also use the same plugins and themes. You effectively you install the plugins and themes on the on the core site the initial site, and then you enable it across the network. And so you can then say this plugin is only available on this site and this theme is available across all the sites or however the case maybe. So the two the two sort of physical differences in terms of the multi sites and each individual what's known as either individual sites or subsites is that the directories for media uploads are separate so each individual site has its own separate media upload directory, and then the separate tables that I mentioned to you earlier which we will dive into in a second. The next thing I want to chat about is why you might want to consider using a multi site network. So when you have a number of sites that are similar in nature doing a similar kind of thing that you need to keep separate from each other but you want to manage them in one place. A multi site network might be a good example of that, or a good solution for that. When you have a group of different sites that need to be managed by one admin. But you also need to be able to give different users control to only specific sites now a good example of that might be a news company. A local South African company called times media, they had four or five news portals and they ran that as a multi site so their main website was the main site. All of the news portals were different sites under that each site was a different company, and only people within the different companies had access to their specific sites but it was all under one multi site umbrella. Or if you need to have a number of sites that belong to the same organization. So I'm going to give you some examples of what I'm talking about in the next slide. So some examples that I've specifically worked on my favorite is the last one. So those of you don't know the make WordPress sites which are essentially the sites that all of the contributors who build and work, and contribute to the WordPress project work on are basically a bunch of multi site network so make WordPress.org is the main site, and then each team so the core team design team accessibility support themes community as we go through this whole list I'm sure I've mentioned this to some of you before. Each team within the WordPress project has its own sub site in the big multi site. And the really interesting and cool thing I think about that is is that you can be a member of for example the training team, and have full and administrator access to all of the training team resources, but you don't therefore have access to all of the sites around your network. So managing a an open source project with with multiple different teams. That is sorry, I'm just, that is a perfect example of where multi site could come in handy. Another, another good example of uses of multi site are higher education. So this is the website of the Arizona State University. And if anybody is near to Arizona. This is a site that I worked on a number of years ago, and they basically have a colleges and schools platform. And then they have all of the colleges and schools listed and each college and school has its own individual site in the multi site. So you'll see the top level domain here is ASU dot edu. But then if we open up the business one it's WP carry dot ASU dot edu so those of you don't know that's a sub domain of the ASU dot edu top devil domain. And every time they have a new college or a new school that needs to be created. They just quickly spin up a new sub site or individual site of the multi site network. Apply whatever theming they need to it and they're and they're ready and off to the races. And they have one web administrator that works for university that manages the multi site, and he can do whatever he needs to all over the place. Okay. Linda says, let's say you have a company that sells use cars, but each city has different cars so to maintain continuity. You can create a multi site with a sub site for each city, so that they can update their unique stock of costs. Yes, that's that's a good example as well. One thing that I would mention though, and this is not related to what Linda was saying but it sparked my memory is that while the subsites or the individual sites I'm going to I'm going to refer to them as subsites going forward but they're also called individual sites or single sites. I'll just call them subsites. While they are part of a network they are not connected to each other so when you think of the word network generally it's we're talking about networking you know a local area network or a wide area network. That means all the computers can talk to each other. WordPress multi site network. It just means that there are multiple sites running on the same WordPress install and being managed by a single admin user. It doesn't mean that the sites can talk to each other. So you, you can't necessarily say that if you logged in on sub site a as user x you would have instant access to sub site be or whatever the case maybe. On on your use case. If you need a site that has multiple different platforms but the data needs to be interactive with each other maybe a multi site doesn't work for your specific requirements. So you need to kind of be able to think about like how is the data trans going back and forth. Multi sites need to be able to interact with each other in terms of the data levels does does a page on site a need to be accessing data from site B. If it does if that's the only reason you're thinking about multi site maybe multi site is not not the best idea. But there are also ways around that so they are pros and cons to both. Im says how much carries from the main site into the subsites and how much can be customized. And when you say how much carries do you mean how much is inherited from the main site to the subsite, or you're talking about how much data is possibly transferred between the two. I just want to make sure I understand your question there while you're while you're responding to that I'll talk about how much can be customized. So you can effectively, when you think about the subsites on a multi site in store you can do the same level of customization in terms of plugins and themes on the subsites as you do in a single site in store. I'll dive into that in a second and I'll show you what I'm talking about there to be to be a little bit clearer but you aren't limited by by customization by you aren't limited in terms of customization because you're running a multi site in store. When you say how much carries from the main site if you mean how much is inherited. Let me when I've when I've set up my local multi site install let me let me dive into that a little bit better. It's easier to do it by way of an example. So when we get there I'll show you kind of how that all works. So I have got that pinned and I will get back to that question. Okay, so while we're talking about examples of multi site next works the other one that I wanted to mention is urban justice. This is I'm not mentioning this for any specific reason other than this is a project that I worked on. They are a nonprofit organization and they have all these different projects that they that they run and each project site is its own individual site using a sub domain in store. And the reason I mentioned these two projects is because as a so the Arizona State University and Urban Justice Center. Both of those projects were essentially running using a core theme a parent theme. And then the parent theme was network enabled across all subsites. And then each site then had a child theme with all of the customizations. And they would the specifically the Arizona Arizona State University. This is a very clever thing the way this developer the original developer work this is the child theme was a single child theme. But then there were were switches in the theme to check which site was being loaded and based on which site was being loaded certain different either functionality or layouts and design was being was being loaded on the sub site. So instead of having to let's say they had 20 subsites instead of having to manage 20 child themes that manage one child theme, and then just made sure they updated the code to check well which site is being loaded and based on that that change then load this functionality, which I thought was quite a clever and interesting way of doing things. Similarly, the. So that was that was the Urban Justice Center, similarly the Arizona State University. They had a child theme that they would load on every site and that child theme was a child theme of another theme that was a page builder theme. So they would just load the child theme with their specific requirements in terms of I think it was fonts and color schemes and those kind of things off the base theme. And then they would use the page builder functionality of the theme to customize the site further. So that I thought was another clever way of making use of this multi site environment to very quickly spin up a new site. Apply the child theme so that all the fonts and letters spacing and all those things are automatically applied. And then all the users have to do is use the page builder functionality to change and create pages and those kind of things so it does give you what it's nice about that example. Is if you have an environment where you need to control the look and feel of your subsites in a specific way you can do that through a multi site in store. You can you can give folks access and you can only enable certain themes and certain plugins for those subsites. And then and then they can only do certain things so that's another way to think about whether or not to use a multi site in store. Okay, I'm going to take a break there and have a sip of water if there are any other questions around multi sites and what they are and how they do things. You can you can let me know while I refresh my throat. So Linda asks is Facebook basically a multi site, not in the way I think of multi sites in terms of WordPress. Because it was written from scratch by the original Facebook developers. I guess it's kind of like a multi site in terms of the functionality that it provides the same core base code, and then you can have pages and posts and those kind of things pages and your profile and those things. So I guess you could say it's similar in the way it works as a multi site. But but not not the way I think about as a WordPress multi site, I wouldn't say that it's that. Okay. Now, when it comes to setting up your multi site, depending on the web host that you use, and the local development environment that you use will determine how you set up a multi site. So I've got a few examples here that I'm going to cover with you I'm going to share the first two links in the chat and then I'll open them up. But for example, SiteGround, which is a WordPress or at least a website hosting platform that also supports WordPress. They use what I consider to be the manual process of setting up a WordPress multi site, which is what we're going to dive into in a second. So you install a new WordPress install and then they have some instructions on how you convert that install to multi site. Kinster on the other hand, and I would just mention I just randomly selected web hosts for this, I just picked two. I don't use either Kinster or SiteGround. So this is not Jonathan's recommendation for hosting. I literally just picked two examples of the two different options. Kinster has this option where you can and I think I've shared that in the chat where there is I'll scroll down a little bit here. There is a button that you click a little checkbox that you tick and you say should we install WordPress multi site when you're setting up a new site. And then you can choose whether you want a sub directory multi site install or a sub domain multi site install and I'll chat about what those two are in a second. So Kinster has this auto installer process and you say multi site enabled from the word go and then it sets it up as a multi site from the word go SiteGround. So you create your default WordPress install and then you have to do some work to enable multi site. Similarly and again I've just randomly picked two local WordPress development environments as the examples here, pasting those in the chat. So those of you who use local WP, it has an option where you can enable multi site for your local development site from the word go. So it has a setting and I'll scroll down here in a sec to get there. So when you're setting it up, there's a little advanced option and it says is this a WordPress multi site. And you can either say no it's not or yes it is and it's a sub directory site or yes it is and it's a sub domain site. And then it creates the site for you there. And then the other one that I've shared with you as well. Dave Kinster also has that sort of automated process they have the sub domain multi site set up. And then things like MAMP and other things I don't have a link for that because it was a YouTube video and I didn't want to have to worry about that in the in the conversation. They follow the manual process. So if you're using something that supports multi site from the word go with some kind of option some way, we're not going to be able to cover all of those today unfortunately. So if you're using local WP, when you create a new site you just say enable multi site and it'll do all the work for you. Or if you're using Dave Kinster, if you're using something a little bit more let's call it traditional and I don't mean it's in terms of old school but just sort of following the more manual process. It'll just install WordPress for you and then you will need to follow the steps that we're going to follow today to set it up. I would, however, recommend that if you've never set up a multi site from scratch yourself that you either find a example local environments or a test hosting environment where you can go through the process yourself because it will help you understand the steps that you need to follow and what those steps do and what changes they make. So today we will be following that manual process. If you if you are using local WP, I don't know if you can just create a default WordPress install and then edit the files to make the changes, you're welcome to try today I just I don't use local WP so I can't recommend that you that you try that today. But you're welcome to give it a try and see if you can change the WP config and possibly the ht access I don't know if that's going to work. The important things to understand is to be able to follow the manual steps you need to be able to edit your WordPress core files specifically your WP config file number one. Your hosting environment or your local development environment needs to support ht access support now ht access is a specific configuration option that Apache Apache web server supports. Some, some local development environments and some web hosting environments use something called engine x which is a more modern web server, and it is possible to set up engine x so that it can support ht access files. So you might need to check with your web host how that works. And I say this under correction, but I would say the majority of web hosts that support the automatic method like we spoke about earlier the dev Kinster way, and the local WP way, it's because they're using engine x. And with engine x you can't, if it doesn't support ht access the the rewrite rules have to be hard coded in engine x config files, which happens to reside on the server in a different location. So that's usually why they support that kind of setup from the word go. And then optionally if you want to have sub domain support or not so let's chat about that very quickly. So if we go back to the Arizona Arizona State University and you look at the WP carry school of business. You'll see that as I mentioned earlier the domain name is WP dot WP carry dot asu dot edu. I just had a little smile in my head because they got WP in the front and it doesn't mean WordPress it's obviously some person with the initials WP but I thought that was quite funny. So that's what's known as a sub domain so the sub domain is the part before the first dot, and then the top level domain is asu dot edu for sub domain to work your server needs to support what's known as sub domain mapping. So that's a special config on the web server that says if a sub domain URL is requested, what site does that belong to. Now depending on your your local development environments, if it doesn't support sub domain mapping you may have to use what's known as the sub directory install option. And the sub directory install I don't know of any in the wild basically instead of having the asu dot edu actually no I do know some in the wild. The make WordPress sites is a good example of one in the world so here the top level URL is make dot WordPress dot org. If I click on for example the training sites, you will see that it is a sub domain of make dot WordPress dot org is where the training sites resides. So it's not a sub domain because make is already a sub domain and it's using that to run the top level domain. So those are the two options you have when you install a multi site. Obviously the sub domain option is cleaner. It sort of gives the site its own sort of home and its own sort of address on the web. The sub domain version works just as well. The sub sorry that not the sub domain the sub folder, sorry, or the sub directory option. The advantage of the sub directory option is it doesn't require any special domain mapping. You can just use it on any web host that supports your top level domain, and then you can have your subsites. So that's just something to think about when you're preparing if you're working on a project that he's using multi site is the client or the customer or whoever you're building it for needing sub domain support. Are they needing sub? Are they happy with sub directory support and then you can take it from them. Okay. Um, it says if you have a multi site, can you break one or more subsites into its own site outside of the network? Okay. So my I've never done this before. But effectively it is possible. However, the way the data is structured requires some work on your part. There are plugins that you can use their migration plugins that I'm aware of that you can use to extract one site from another. There are also tutorials on the web that will work you through that process. It's not something we can cover today. I don't have enough time to prepare that today. But if you would like to I could I could pair a workshop on that process. So we could take one of the subsites that I create today and we could break it off into its own site if you would like to see that process. So it is possible. If you're using one of the off the shelf options, they'll enable it for you. If you're doing it manually, it's a little bit of work, but it is possible. And it might be a good idea to set up as a future workshop. So if you think that's a good idea, let me know. And I'll prepare that one. But yes, it is possible to do that. All right. So now I'm going to go through the steps that are needed to set up a multi site install for yourself. This is sort of the way things used to be done before we had, you know, engine X before we had managed WordPress hosts. By default WordPress was just installed on the server for you using something like what was it called. Scriptaculous I think it was called or some there was I remember it was a cPanel thing that would auto install the WordPress version for you. I remember you would click it you could install PHP BB and WordPress and Joomla and Drupal and all these things. I don't know if you remember it, but I know it was a cPanel module. But essentially you would take your single WordPress install and you would convert it to a multi site and that's what we're going to be doing today. So the article or the documentation we're going to be working on is the first one that I shared with you. So let's go back to that. I did share it in the chat, but I will share it again. It's this creating a network documentation. I would say that before you begin, it is a good idea to read the before you can create a network page where they talk about and that was the other one that I shared with you which I will share with you again. And that one just covers the sort of high level requirements and we're going to go over them very quickly. The first question is, do you really need a network. And it talks about how these things work and give some examples about when it would be a good idea to use multi sites and when not so I do recommend reading that. It talks about the types of network and we have covered that briefly but it talks about the sub domain option or the sub directory option. So sub domain each side has a different sub domain for example site one site two example, or the other one has a different path example.com site one example.com site two. We're going to be following the sub directory method today because I don't have sub domain mapping enabled on my local development environment. So I want to do a sub domain install I have to create individual records for each of the sub domains, and I haven't got around to automating that yet. So we're going to be following the sub directory path. Then it talks about admin requirements. It says to create a multi site network you must be the administrator of the WordPress the initial WordPress installation. You need access to the service file system which I've mentioned, which is specifically the config file and the access file. You need specific knowledge of WordPress PHP and those kind of things, but it does help. And then server requirements, it specifically talks about things that are installed on the server. The majority of these things are installed by default it's very rare that you will find a web host today in 2023 that doesn't have these things installed. But it does talk about HT access support, or a way to write to those config files, the mod rewrite package to be loaded on the patchy, and then certain settings to be set up, follow some links and those things. So if you find your multi site doesn't work on your web host you can ping your web host and chat to them about these things. And it talks a bit more about that here it talks about the DNS records and those things for setting up the domain mapping and the path mapping. And then it also talks here about giving WordPress its own directory so it is possible and we mentioned this in previous workshops it's possible to move certain files around, move your WP config file around and change some settings on your WordPress site. And it's kind of slightly different from the default install. And so this section talks about that if you have if you have moved WordPress into its own separate directory sort of higher than the root level, then there are certain things you need to be aware of. So the documentation is all there which is great. It also talks about some restrictions. If you create a network if your WordPress address is not using port 80 and 443 80 is the default ports on the server for HTTP traffic 443 is the default port for all HTTPS or secure HTTP traffic. And you cannot choose a subdomain install in certain specific instances so it's a good idea to make sure we understand all of those. So read through that if you're if you're planning on setting it up. Once we've covered the requirements we can actually start preparing WordPress and the first thing it says is make sure you back up your databases and files. My recommendation is don't ever create a WordPress multi site from a WordPress site that's active, rather create a new multi site and then move things around if you need to import some data if you need to. Because if things go wrong during the installation and you lose data then it's a mission to restore all of that so try and prepare before the project to say right this is going to be a multi site so let's do it from day one from the from the get go and go from there. You also need to make sure that pretty permalinks work which again, most web hosts do support these days. You can check that very quickly I'm going to log into my specifically set up a multi multi press dot test local site. So making sure that they are working is simply a case of going into your settings, going into the permalink setting and just switching it to any one of the permalink options, saving the changes and then making sure that works on the front end so if I go to a single blog post for example hello world here, I should see a permalink, as opposed to a query string to URL. So make sure that's working. It also recommends that you deactivate all active plugins, and the reason for that is your plugins. What when you create the multi site network you've got the main site which is the top level site. And then you have all of the subsites and you will need to be able to activate the plugin on both the main site and the subsites which what's called network activation. And so it's a good idea to have them deactivated upfront and then reactivate it after the change. Okay, so that's all the sort of the configuration and the setup and things. Then it says right now we need to enable multi site years where we start coding. So the first thing we do is we open up the WP config file I'm going to open up my code editor quickly so we can see what that looks like. This is my WP config file here. Going to make this a little bit bigger if I can wise my there we go. And there we go. Most of you I think know what the conflict file looks like it's the place where your database credentials are stored. It has any any other config any other configuration constant setup where you enable debugging debugging. And then here there is a section where it says add any custom values between this line and the stop editing line. And that's where we're going to work exclusively today. So the first thing that you do is you add this constant to your WP config I'm going to just copy this out. I'm just going to disable this little. This is a little chat GPT extension that I'm going to just disable very quickly because it's getting in the way. Now it's not going to the manage extensions page come on. There we go. And it's just disabled that it's this is very handy it helps me explain things but I'm searching on the web. So check that one out if you're interested. So it's this it's this code here so define allow WP allow multi-site true. So we copy that code out pop on over into my into my WP config and there I've got defined WP allow multi-site true. That's the first change that I make. Now what that will do is that will in the WordPress dashboard execution if that constant is enabled if that constant is created. Now I'm going to enable a specific option in my in my WordPress settings. So once that code is added to my WP config file, I switch back to my WordPress site and I go back to the dashboard. And now there is an additional item in sorry known settings in tools. So if I hover over the tools menu item there in network setup option. I click on that and it takes me to a page where it says right you want to enable multi-site for the site. That's something you can do from within the dashboard. It's specifically only if you can edit that WP config because you don't want any user or any admin users to necessarily be able to do this. You want somebody who knows what they're doing to be able to enable this. So it requires that little bit of knowledge of how to add the files to the WP config and access as well. And it says fill in the information below you need and gives you some some details. And the first option is the sub-domain option, which is what most folks use because they like that clean URL. Or below that is the sub-directory option. That's the one I'm going to use today because I don't have domain mapping set up as I mentioned. So all my sub-domains are going to break. If you select sub-domain, it actually goes through the process of checking whether it can access a sub-domain on your top level domain. And if it can't, it gives you a warning. So for today, I'm going to select sub-directories. Then it just confirms the address is multi-site.test or multi-press.test, which is what I do have there. I can give the network a title. So it defaults to multi-press sites. I can change that if I want to. And then it gives me a question about or at least a field to put in for the admin email address for the network admin. So remember, we can create administrators in the individual sites, but we have the network admin that controls everything. So I'm going to leave that as default and I'm going to say install. This then runs a few things in the background and then says to you, right, now you need to make some more changes. And the very first thing it says is you should back up your existing WP configuration access files now. And the reason for that is because we're going to make changes to those files. I'm not going to back them up now. But if you are doing this on your site or on your web host, it's a good idea to do so. So the first thing it tells me I need to add some more configuration settings to my WP config. So I'm going to copy those out very quickly. It's basically and we'll talk through what each one of those is doing. So the first thing is I've got to leave the WP allow multi sites. So that I've got to leave is true. And then I've got to add all of these other ones. And I'm basically saying multi site is true. So this is a multi site. It's using the sub it's not using the sub domain installs using the sub directory installs. So we've set that to false. It takes the current URL as the domain current site and sets that up. It sets the path. So if the path is different, if we've moved it to a WordPress directory that's different from the root, it'll set that up. Then it sets up the site ID current site to one, which is the current site and the blog ID current site to one, which is the current site. It's the same value. Now, if you have, for example, created different subsites and whatever else those numbers might be different, but usually it defaults to one if this is a key WordPress install. Okay, so that's the first thing that I need to do. The second thing I need to do is I need to add this detail to my HD access directory. Sorry, HD access file. And you'll see it says specifically I need to replace the other WordPress rules. So by default, let me show you what my HD access looks like by default by default. If you if you have a default WordPress install and it was able to create the HD access file on installation, this is what it looks like. Sometimes I've had this on local WordPress install. Sometimes it doesn't create this file and I need to go and find it on the web and then I copy and paste it in here. But this is what it should look like. And it's everything between this if module mod rewrite part. So it's everything from rewrite engine on to the last rewrite rule that I have to replace. So going back into my setup page, I'm going to copy all of this out. You see it starts rewrite engine on and then there's the last rewrite rule and you'll see those two are the same in between things are changing. Things are very different. Yours might be slightly different to mine depending on your local environment and your local setup. But then I replace all of that code with what was given to me with the network settings. And those are the two changes, the two big changes that I have to make. Now, I remember the first time I had to do this. I knew that I was changing config settings and I knew that I was changing server level settings. So I was very nervous the first time I did it. So I do recommend the first time you do this. Do this on a local WordPress install that supports it so that you can understand how it works and how the process goes. If you're not sure what local development environments you use, if the one you're using doesn't support you, the ability to make these changes. Just look for any environment that allows you to edit, for example, the HD access or the WP config and create the multi multi press install yourself. MAMP I think allows you to do it. I know Lara gone, somebody mentioned Lara gone in the meetup chat. That one's a little bit more sort of Laravel focus, but you can store WordPress sites on Lara gone. That should enable you to do it because it's using sort of default server level things. It's a good idea to sort of go through this process one us and understand what all the pros and cons are. Okay, I'm just going to go back here. Once that's done, you'll see right at the bottom here, it says once you complete these steps, your network is enabled and configured and you will need to log in again. Now, before we do that, I want to show you something in the database level. So let me just quickly log into my local database installation here. I'm using PHP my admin locally. And I want to show you two things. So this is the learn press site that I usually use for my demos. And you'll see it has 12 tables. Users, user mates, blah, blah, blah, all the way up to comments. And I'm going to leave this open over here. I'm going to actually zoom in a little bit so we can kind of see it a little bit bigger. Zooming doesn't seem to be working for me right now. So let's do that. There we go. So there we can see the list of those tables. If I open my multi-press site over here and we click on it, you'll see that it has more than 12 tables. In fact, it has 18 tables. So it's already installed the additional six tables needed for a multi-price net, multi-price, multi-press, multi-site flip, multi-site network to work. So once we, let me go back to my code. Once we added that first configuration setting and we refresh the dashboard. And it gave us that page and said, you're ready to set things up and we hit enter, then it created all of that, all of those tables. So it's a good idea to understand what those tables are and what some of them are doing. So if I scroll up to the right here, I'm keeping learn press open so we can see the original tables that WordPress install would have. And then I want to keep this one on screen so we can see the 18 that are here. You'll see that, I think this is all of them. Yes. You'll see that new tables include WP blog meta and WP blogs. Comment meta and comments are the same links is the same options is the same post meta and post is the same registration log is new. Sign ups is new because you can allow folks to sign up to create sites. WP sites is new and WP site meta is new terms, terms and terms meta is the same relationships and taxonomy is the same and user meta and users is the same. So those are all the new tables that have been added. If we have a look at for example the blogs table. You'll see that we have sites ID one blog ID one multipressed up test. That's the first site that we created. I want to show you when we create a new site what changes there. And then we have metadata associated which there isn't any yet. We have sign ups there aren't any yet we have registrations there aren't any yet. But that's what gets created. And then it says you will have to log in again. If you try to refresh your dashboard page now, it will log you out. And the reason it logs you out is because the cookie that is stored in your browser is assigned to your single site install. The manager convert to a multi site install the cookie that it looks for to check if you're the network admin, the key changes. So it looks for that key doesn't find it and logs you out so you need to log in as the administrator again. Once you log in. You will see that things are quite different. So let me just get this page is the same. It gives you all this detail just to make sure that you're still here. But if you click on your dashboard link now, you'll notice that, for example, you suddenly have the sites menu item. You have a user's menu item themes plugin settings and that's it. There's no more posts. There's no more pages. Those are all belonging to the individual sites. So you still have your first level site that you created the default site that you can manage and create posts and pages and themes and plugins and all of that. But then you can now create additional sites in your network. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the sites option over here and this goes to all sites. And there is the what's known as the main site. So that's basically the data of the first site in the original tables. I'm then going to add a new site. So I can never think of fun names for my new sites. I shall call him Bob. And the site title shall be Bob. And we'll leave the languages English and we'll just make the email Bob at multi press dot test. And it says a new user will be created if the above email address is not in the database, which I know it isn't. And the username and password will be sent to that user. So let's add that site. Okay. If we now click on all sites, now we have two sites. We have the main site, which is muscle multi site, multi press dot test. And we have multi press dot test slash Bob. If I open up multi press dot test. Sorry, let me go back one step. Let me visit the site. I can see whatever's installed on multi press dot test. And if I open up and visit Bob the front end, it has the same. There's the copy of the data. It's not the same data. It's basically a new way to install with a new default data, new default theme, et cetera. Let's go back to the database and see what's happening there. So if we refresh multi press, sorry, I've got some things over my screen here. No, that's not what I want. Here we go. Now you'll see suddenly we have 28. So additional tables are created every time you create a new site on a multi person store. And you will see that those tables are right at the top here. And they have the, in this case, WP underscore two, because it's the second site. So it's given the idea of two, because the previous one was one. And then it has comments and comment meta links, options, posts and post meta terms and terms, meta term relationships, term tax on it. So all of those tables are only belonging to site number two. I see your question there and I'll get to that in a second. So now when you create content on site two, for example, in this case, Bob. So now I'm logged in as Bob as the Bob admin and I go to the dashboard. And now this looks like a normal WordPress install that I'm used to. And I can go to my posts over here and I'm going to go to the first one. And I'm going to say here, let's go. Sorry. For some reason it's not selecting. Let's say hello, Bob. And we just keep it super simple so we can see that change. And now if we go back and we go and visit the Bob site, we will see now hello Bob on the Bob site. So multi price, multi press dot test Bob. But if we go back to the original multi press site, that's using the original content. So there you can see how the different tables affect the different sites. The other thing to note that I wanted to show you quickly before I get to M's question is if you go to the blogs table, you will see now it's created a record for the new sites because it's the second one in the list. It's auto incremented the blog ID. So first site, the main site is blog ID one. The second site is blog ID two. They all belong to site ID one. So your site ID is your whole your network of sites. And it stores things like the path. And then this is what this number, this ID here is what is used to create the prefix for your second sites tables. So if we created a third site, it would be ID three. And then all those tables with WP underscore three would be created. If we deleted three and then created a new site, the new site would get full. And WP four tables would be created and so on and so on and so on. Okay. M says, can you change an existing site into a multi site and vice versa multi site single site. It is possible to change a single site into a multi site. So if you have an existing site with content with data, all those kind of things, you cancel, come back and make all those changes. As I mentioned earlier, in the suggestions and in the requirements, they do recommend doing a backup because in that step of enabling multi sites in the config and then hitting the network setup, entering that data and hitting submit. If something should interact with that step and it breaks, you might lose your original data. So that's why it's recommended to do it from a clean site from the word go, but it is possible to do multi site to single site. Theoretically would be possible. I'm not sure why you would do it initially talking about taking all the data from the single site and merging it back into the multi site. You would need to do that manually. So while possible, not recommended. And then Elena says, if one of the multi sites has been hacked, will other multi site websites also be influenced? That's a very good question. It depends on the hack. So if the hack is based on user access, somebody with user related, so let's say somebody hacks a username and password and is able to log into one of the sub sites, they shouldn't be able to have access to the main site or any of the other sites because while it's using the same installation, as I mentioned earlier, the sites are not really talking to each other. However, if your main site is hacked, then that's going to give you access to everything. So it's the same level of security as a single site install. Again, it depends on the hack. It also depends on whether you have any plugins or themes installed that allow access to things that they shouldn't do. So I don't want to mention any names, but there was a plugin recently that there was quite a big security vulnerability published. And it was related to administrator access not being checked. If somebody got in based on that, they might be able to access some other pages if they knew where to go. They could possibly access the network admin page if the right user checks aren't in place. So that's why it's another good idea to keep your plugins and themes updated. Make sure you're following security vulnerability updates to make sure you keep things up to date. But with a default WordPress install, you should be safe if a single site does get hacked. Okay, the other thing I wanted to show you very quickly today is kind of how the themes and the plugins work of things. So when I'm logged in as the network admin, if I go into my themes, you'll see that 2023 is what's known as network enabled. But 2021 and 2022 are network disabled. So when I go to my sites, and I'm not going to switch to the dashboard of the main site. So it looks like a default dashboard that I'm used to. And I'm going to switch to the dashboard of my Bob site. Let's go back to network admin. Let's go sites. Let's go Bob dashboard. Here we go. So I understand I'm logged in as the admin user now on this site. I'm going to log out to log in as Bob in a second. I'll show you some things there. But you'll see if I go to the appearance themes option, I don't have the option to install any of the network deactivated themes. Only the themes that have been activated for the network. So if I wanted to activate the theme for the network, I could go and I could say, let's go back to the network side. Let's go back to themes. And I could then network enable 2021, for example, and then allow certain sites to add or remove it. You'll also notice, so what I'm going to do very quickly now is I'm going to switch and I'm going to edit Bob because I want to change his password just to a simple password that I can remember. And I'm going to log into multiprase.testBob as Bob, not as the network admin. So to do that, I'm going to open up a new incognito window and I'm going to go to multiprase.testBob and I'm going to go to WP admin. And I can do that as per normal on the subdomain, the redirection and all that works because I'm running a multi-site and I can log in as Bob and I can log in with a password. And you will see that when I go to the themes page, there are the themes that I can install. This is one of the things to sort of understand. By default, as a sub-site admin, I can't install themes. You see, I don't have the option to install themes. If I go back to, let me minimize this. And if I go back to, here is the Bob user. And here we go. You will notice that I also can't enable those settings for Bob. So you are limited in terms of that. Your admins can't install themes. Let's go back to Bob over here. There we go. You'll also notice they can't install plugins. So that's also something to think about when you're thinking about if you want to use multi-site. If you want your administrators for the different sites to be able to install their own themes of plugins, multi-site might not be the solution for you. If you don't mind, if you want to control it and only allow them to select from the themes that you've enabled, then multi-site might be a good solution for you. That might be a solution if that's your specific requirement. You want an environment where folks can only install the themes that you allow. Then a multi-site might be exactly what you need as an example. OK. So M says to explain the question, if you created a multi-site but didn't set up any sub-sites. I see what you're saying. Yes, that should be possible. My understanding is that it's just effectively a case of removing all those constants from the WP config and deleting the additional tables and all the data that was added during the install. And then that should revert back to a standard single-site installation. I've never done it before, so I can't say that for sure. Again, we could try that another day if you would like to. We could have some fun with it if you wanted to guarantee that you get the answer there. But theoretically, that should be possible. If you've enabled multi-site, you haven't made any changes and you realize you want to go back to single-site, you effectively just roll back the changes that you've made. The easier way to do that would be to make sure you've done the backup first and then just revert the backup. That'll be a lot easier than trying to because now you've got to delete tables and there might be additional fields that you have to delete in certain, sorry, additional rows in certain tables. So better to just restore from a backup if that's the process you take. Okay, Linda says, can you point additional unique URLs to a sub-site on your multi-site? Linda, I assume by that what you mean is, let's say you have bob.multi-press.test and you also want to point Charlie.multi-press.test. My understanding is that it's possible, but what will happen? You can do that on the server level, but what it will be is it'll be a redirect and I'll tell you why. If you have a look at the data, the domain is stored as multi-press.test.bob. So if you register say Charlie.multi-press.test and you point it to Bob, then when it's looking up images or those kind of things, it's going to be looking for it in Charlie.multi-press.test and it might not find it. So while it is theoretically possible, it does require a little bit of additional configuration on the server level. Okay, and then it says do all multi-sites and the main site share the same bandwidth and influence each other. The answer is effectively yes because it is all just one WordPress install. So it's going to be, you're not going to, the bandwidth, the sort of people browsing your multi-site network, they're going to be hitting that install. So let's say you have 10 sites and those 10 sites have a thousand active users. That's 10,000 acts of requests to your WordPress install. So it's not going to be shared because it's a WordPress install. The server doesn't know that it's a WordPress install. The server just sees all the different requests. So you're not going to have a speed influence from switching to multi-site as an example. Then this is for example, if I have multi-press.bob, can I use an existing URL such as example.com? Linda, maybe you want to unmute and explain a little bit better what you're saying there. I don't think I'm understanding 100%. You can certainly point it to the new site. Oh, I see what you're saying. You mean a top level domain to point to a sub-site. Do you mean that? So if you have, let's say Charlie.com and you want to point it to multi-site, say Charlie.multi-site or multi-site slash Charlie. Again, you can point it, but I don't think it's possible to, it's the same thing. This is getting a little bit onto the server level side of things and I don't want to give you the wrong answer. I'm trying to think. I do think it's possible and I'll tell you why. As we mentioned earlier, WordPress.com is essentially a big multi-site and WordPress.com supports custom domains. So I want to say it is possible and then I'm going to add by saying, it probably requires some server level configuration that I don't know of hand. So I'll need to check that one out. I'll make a note. Let me just, would it be a redirect? You could do it with a redirect, but then as I mentioned earlier with a redirect, it means that your resources are going to be looked for on the sub-domain. So if you're happy with that, if you wanted to say, let's say somebody searches for Charlie.com and then on the server, it redirects to multi-press.com slash Charlie. If you're happy with that, it means the user is going to see multi-press.tes slash Charlie or Charlie, whatever, that will work. So you can redirect top-level domain, but if you want to have it so that the address doesn't ever change, but it serves the content on the sub-site, it is, I would say, theoretically possible, but it requires some server level configuration that I'm not, I don't remember or have in my head at this point in time. Yes, probably using DNA settings or something like that. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a note of this in my issue for this session and just double-check about the top-level domain to multi-site sub-site. There's probably some answers on the internet that would give you the answer for that, but I'll go and find out and I'll just come back with sort of a definitive answer and maybe link off to some things and check with some folks. Okay, awesome. All right. So that's how you create a multi-site network. That's what happens in the background when a multi-site network is created. There's a whole bunch you can do with a multi-site network. I'm not going to dive into those things now, but there's a whole bunch of stuff you can play around with and have fun with. Next week, we're going to be looking at, I need to remember here, I'm not going to remember. I have it, just give me a second here. Online workshop. I'm going to go find this off-screen quickly because it requires me to log into a personal thing and then I'm going to find the workshop calendar that I'm looking for and then I will let you know what we're covering next week because it's gone from my brain. Next week, we're going to be looking at, okay, so we've kind of covered it today, but it's how a multi-site install differs from a single site. So we're really going to dive into the database changes. We're going to dive into plugins and themes and how they work and users and things and how they work. We're going to look at some of the things that are set up with a multi-site network, some of the things that you can access. And then the week after that, we might change track a little bit. I'll see when I've done the research. But then either next week or the week after that, we'll also be looking at when you're developing themes and plugins for a multi-site network, what are the things that you need to be aware of? And we're going to dive into how that works. Okay, there's some more questions. So M says, it would be great to have a separate session on converting multi-site single and taking a sub-site out of the network, mad science experiments. Yes, I'm going to actually, I'm going to, I hope you don't mind, I'm going to copy your comment there and I'm going to paste it in the comments here. So I have it as, I love the mad science experiments comment. You read my mind there. I'm going to paste that into the comments here because I might find when I do my research, what I wanted to cover next week, I've already covered. So we'll see how that goes. So I'm going to pop that in the comments. Jeff says, I have a multi-site set up with multiple domains pointing to the same install. Okay, so Jeff, Jeff, it sounds like he has things all set up there. So that's great. He might be able to give us some examples. M says again, if you have an existing site, can you create a multi-site main site above it to keep the first site as a sub-site? That I don't actually have an answer to. I'm pretty sure that the single site needs to be the main site. But let me make a note of that and find out. So I'm going to pop that in my questions here as well. And maybe next week will just be a questions and answers session about multi-sites based on all of these things here. But that I don't, it's the best of my knowledge. It needs to be the main site first. But let me find out and get back to you. Well, Jeff, while Jeff is checking in on his, his multiple domains pointed to the same install. As I say, my understanding is it is possible, but it does require some, some configurations. Okay. Any other questions around all of this that we've gone through while Jeff is looking in there. The two, the two articles that I've shared with you are sort of the definitive, definitive pieces of documentation that you need to read. So let's see what we've done today is just go through and go through all of these things. It talks about administration. It talks about multi-site network administration. When you enable the multi-site network, it creates a super admin. So there's different roles and capabilities there. So let's get back to, to the question that I think Lena had earlier around security. So your, your single site admins, they have certain commissions and roles and capabilities. And then your super admin has other ones. So if a user on an admin user on a single site got hacked, they wouldn't be able to do the same things that a super admin could, for example. So it does sort of protect security up the chain kind of thing in that way. And then there are some related articles around what we're going to be cover, going to be covering down the line. Okay. Jeff, I don't know if you've had a chance to have a look at how your setup is there. There's another question. Can subsites pull media on the main site? So as I mentioned earlier, the, let's actually show you that quickly. That's a good point. Let me actually show you that. I don't know if it's going to be set up yet. It might be. No, it won't. So let me actually just add some media to the sites. So let's go to the multi-press site. Let's go to the Bob site. And let's add an image. I don't know if I've got the images lying around. I think I do. There's a WordCamp Europe something picture that I can use. Okay. Jeff's about to post some screenshots there. So while he's doing that, I'm going to, so there's an image that I uploaded. Sorry. I'm just moving my screen here. There's an image that I uploaded to the Bob site. And now I'm going to upload a separate image to the, the main site. Let's find a different image. Let's do the GitHub co-pilot one. And then I want to show you what happens in the actual sites in store. So when we go to the uploads directory, you'll see that there is a sites folder. And then there is inside the 2023, that's uploaded the GitHub to co-pilot. So it creates this sites too. Let me actually show you that in a, it's easier to see it in a file browser as opposed to, can you see the file browser on my screen right now? I don't think you can. Because of what I've shared. Yeah, that's what I thought. Okay. Let me do this. Let me just stop to share very quickly. And I'm going to specifically share the whole screen. If I can. I don't think I can. So I'm just going to share my finder window now. So you should see my, my finder window, which is the file browser. And if I go into multi-press and I go into WP content. Okay. Jeff says he needs permission to upload screenshots. Jeff, if you wouldn't mind doing me a favor. And I don't know how to actually enable that. So let me, let me do this. Okay. Let me see if I can figure this out. This is sorry. I'm in the chat. I need to be in the participants window. Okay. Here we go. Okay. Let me find Jeff. And Jeff, I hope we can trust you, my friend. I'm going to say, let me just see if I can. Yeah, I don't know how this works. Okay. I'll actually, I'll actually share my email address in the chat. I don't mind. It's public. It's Jonathan Bosinger at gmail.com. So if you wouldn't mind sending those through. And then I'll open them up once we've had a look at the file browser. So Jeff, if you could send those through so long. Let me get back to the file browser, so can you still see my WP content folder? I hope. So if I go into the uploads directory, you'll see there is in the sites directory, there is a site number two. And that contains my images that I installed on the Bob site. And then there is the defaults, 20, 23, 04, which is installing the main site images. So if I created a site three, it would create a three in the sites folder. And then the media would be shared there. So the reason we did that was because Linda said, can subsites pull media on the main site? So they can't access the media because it's in a separate location, but obviously most media is public. So you would be able to maybe using something like the WordPress REST API or just the URL to the image. You could include it in content somewhere, but you can't access it. You can't while you're creating a post or a page in a subsite, access the media in the top level site because it's physically separate. And that gets back to what we were chatting about earlier where. Don't think of the multi site network as a interconnected network of sites. It's just a bunch of different sites that happen to be running on the same WordPress install using the same folder structure. Everything is housed within the same space, but they don't necessarily have ways to talk to each other. If you were wanting to build something that allowed them to talk to each other, the REST API is a good example. There's some workshops out there about the REST API you might remember. So that's one way to do it. You could make a request to the REST API of the one site to pull data in that way or content or whatever that way. There are some plugins that allow sites to talk to each other. So those are the ways you would go about it. I'm going to open up my Gmail account while we're here to see if we can get those screenshots from Jeff. So you can see what that looks like. So just give me one second here and thank you, Jeff, for sharing those. I do appreciate it. And I don't mind sharing my public email because I'm very good at ignoring what I need to ignore. Okay, so here we go. So Jeff has sent some things through from super admin level. So I'm going to open those up in screen here. So site URL, home URL is set up. Shop fan criticism. Interesting. Let me move this out the way here. And then he's got different administrators. The top level URL is there. So it's set up in a certain way. So these are the kind of things that I'm probably going to go into next week. So I'll actually see if I can set up on my local environment, a couple of sort of top level domains and see if I can point them to sites. And you might have all given me some good fodder for my next workshop. So thank you for that. I really do appreciate these questions because this helps me prepare. These are the things that I want to know. So when you have those questions that I can't answer, it gives me topics that I can use for future workshops. So thank you for that. Oh, you couldn't see the screenshots. Oh, I apologize. This Zoom screen showing thing. Let me stop share and let me open up my email again. Sorry, folks. Zoom used to be able to allow you to just share the desktop. And then whatever was on the desktop was shared, but it seems to be not the case anymore. So here we go. So here's the multi-site admin from Jeff. I'm now going to start the share again. Yeah, the domain mapping on the server level. That's what I thought there would be some domain mapping required. So let me share my screen now. I want this one. And let's share that. So now you should see the settings. So as you can see, Jeff is using WP engine. So this is his network admin. So the site is tasteful route. That's the URL. And then the next one is this is different sites. These are the users on the site. And then this is a, I'm guessing this is an individual site. So he's actually set the site URL in the site itself to whatever. So it looks like, yeah, absolutely. Linda to answer your question as Jeff has pointed out for us. Thank you, Jeff. That it is possible to set that up. It probably just requires some, some, some DNS settings to enable it. But it certainly does look like it's possible. And I've learned something today. I didn't even know that was possible. I've never used multi-site in that way. I've only ever used it either as a sub domain setup or the sub directory setup. So now I'm keen to learn how that works. I will go and do some research and I will report back next week. So shall I just call next week's workshop? Answers to your questions about multi-site and maybe get some other folks who might have watched this, the session to, to respond with their questions. I think that would be a good way to, to prepare the next session. Okay. This was planned for an hour, but we ran out of time. And that's great. I don't mind at all. But I do need to start wrapping up. Yes, Linda says multi-site part duo. I like it. Thank you all for your time. Thank you, Jeff, Em, Linda, Lana, everybody else that I couldn't think of for your, for your questions. It was great to work through all of those with you and stay tuned for whatever next week's going to be. It's going to be answers to some questions. It's going to be diving into the changes and the differences. I will take those questions and I will set up some examples of how those will work and report back. But please do enjoy the rest of your Thursday and the rest of your weekend. And I will see you again. We should just call it multi, I love that M. We should just call it multi-site mad experiments. That's what we should just call next week's session. Mad science experiments. Great. Thank you all for joining me. It was lovely to see you all and have a great rest of your day. Bye.