Official Multisite Support for the Wordpress app (managed and unmanaged)
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@Lonk Hey, great reasoning, and I'm all for choice if you have experience and a use-cases. My understanding is that wordpress.com itself is one super multi-site, so it can make sense for SaaSifying WP.
Having been through this decision a few years go, we actually went with single-sites, although we have the advantage of a complete GitLab CI/CD process, so we have single repos for the stack, plugins & themes then deployed to all instances on commits with the GitLab Runners pipeline.
We went this route for a more containerised approach to sites, so that issues would likely not bring down all sites, and each would be portable should the client wish to be involved or have on hosting they control.
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https://brandlight.org is our site to explain our stack but mostly from a business perspective than technical.
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https://brandlight.org/i/partnerships/clients/ are the sites we have live so far with this approach.
We have been actively contributing to the Distributor plugin from 10up for replicating content with a Hub & Spoke approach to managing content:
We're intending to open-source the Brandlight stack one day but for now it's a private project. If you're at that level with development then I'd be happy to invite you into our GitLab repos under trust that currently our primary needs are business development. We don't sell code, plugins or themes, and none of our work is intended for that, it's just for our own self-funded sites until we get to a point we can open it up to more clients. We have a backlog of 12 sites to get through before that though.
I have an open-mind for multi-site but actually we're going to use the Cloudron API to launch single-sites for demo & launch needs through an interface on brandlight.org at some point. So clients know they can use our hosting or their own as they prefer, with all the disclaimers that would involve of course.
For interest, with all the https://swanson.co.uk international sites you'll see on the above link and linked in the site footer, they are a single site with domain aliases handled in the code for localisation preferences.
Our overall goal is building an international enterprise Woocommerce stack, highly optimised for speed, with all the groupware features businesses need for information processing and publishing alongside handling products.
Much of what we do is optimisation for uncached speed, fragment caching, ajax etc, since full page caching doesn't work for our primary need to serve logged-in users with dynamic content.
If you like WP dev stuff, be happy to introduce you to our team in Discord. Certainly some collab opportunities for making the Brandlight stack work as a private Cloudron App initially and perhaps a public one later depending on interest.
Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
Development https://brandlight.org
Life https://marcusquinn.com -
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@marcusquinn Absolutely, I don't see a need for your GIT since I'm not quite sure what you guys do yet, but I'd love to join your Discord and discuss WP related development. If they have a DM on this (most forums do), you can just DM an invite link.
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I was wrong, aside from adding support for
domain aliasesas noted above, there is one more change needed to make this have feature parity with Wordpress Single Site installations. I was looking up the Cloudron source code and it uses the WP CLI to run cron manually every minute on the base domain, thiscron.shscript (https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/wordpress-unmanaged-app/-/blob/master/cron.sh) would need to be edited to something like:WP_PATH="/path/to/wp"; for SITE_URL in $(wp site list --fields=domain,path,archived,deleted --format=csv --path="$WP_PATH" | grep ",0,0$" | awk -F ',' '{print $1 $2}'); do wp cron event run --due-now --url="$SITE_URL" --path="$WP_PATH"; doneSo that it runs that same command on every active site.
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I think the demand for domain aliases is there so this issue will likely just fix itself. But I'll write a modified https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/wordpress-unmanaged-app/-/blob/master/cron.sh to automatically trigger every site within a multisite's cron jobs (yeah, you have to cron per sub-site, it's silly). Technically, right now, even with subdirectories, I don't think any cron's except for the primary domains are running rn for the people that have multisite installed with subdirectories (like me).
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I've been thinking, I would be tempted to keep going with separate WP instances (to more finely control resource allocation to specific clients) if we could create some sort of "app folder" system. Or app categories.
Not trying to invalidate this issue because its still important. But this just popped into my head. I can make a request for it.
I'm imagining something like app folders on iOS or Android or like collapsable sections.
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@atrilahiji I agree that these two would be separate issues. I plan on adjusting the Cloudron Wordpress Project for Multisite support after @girish and @nebulon are finished with 6.0. Which I’m really hoping will come with domain aliases.
Cause I can do the rest very easily (domain alias code is needed at the Cloudron level and it turned out to be a pretty popular feature request by itself which was cool). I have a decade of Wordpress (and WooCommerce) development experience and I found a new platform that I really love to work out it in (Cloudron).The funny thing is, was that this platform was the one cloud panel I found with a no-op for DNS domain lookup which I needed for a specialized project I was working on. And I just fell in love with the platform after that - then even more after being part of the forums here. Everyone here is encouraging and it makes development fun.
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@atrilahiji But definitely put in a request for folders for apps. That’s will def beneeded in the future with all the apps we’re coming out with now!
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@Lonk Will do! And same, I am hoping to be able to contribute by packaging some apps and develop some apps (details coming soon) that will be set up to work quite nicely with Cloudron. Huge fan of the platform and the annual cost is a small price to pay to have this wonderful hosting experience and ensure that our lords and saviors @girish and @nebulon are compensated for their hard work.
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@atrilahiji I may have gotten a little trigger happy with the feature requests today. I already put yours in.
https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/3220/organize-apps-into-folders-via-tags/8
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I loved WPMU back in the early 2000s and always used to install it with SQLite. Why expose a networked DB?
It's harder to do in Cloudron as each app is tied to a single domain + aliases if set. This goes further with SSL certs and rev-proxy setup.
If all the feedback loops required are addressed it would be a welcome addition as I've just been handed ~278 domains to deal with
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@robi As soon as Domain Aliases become a thing on Cloudron (right now they're just redirections), I'll hook Wordpress Multisite to the Cloudron API so you don't have to leave Wordpress to create the new domain either (since domain mapping is built directly into WP Multisite now).
I'll merge request the unmanaged and managed Wordpress installations with my Multisite Optimizations. But waiting for Cloudron 6.0 to do so due to Wordpress changes being released on that version, and it's release date is getting closer.
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@Lonk awesome, sounds like a plan.
BTW, for those that still have to manage many WP sites individually, I recently came across something that makes it easier and it's free, called GoDaddy Pro.
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@robi said in Official Multisite Support for the Wordpress app (managed and unmanaged):
BTW, for those that still have to manage many WP sites individually, I recently came across something that makes it easier and it's free, called GoDaddy Pro.
I hate GoDaddy. Horrible company.
MainWP is similar and GPL (with premium add-ons):
https://mainwp.com/ -
@jdaviescoates Can vouch for MainWP, it’s a pretty cool concept because it runs inside of another WP installation which makes making add-ons (I make a lot of WP plugins) for it so much easier.
