Does anyone in Reclaim /DoOO land have any experience using the WordPress Multi-Network plugin?
[WP Multi Network – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org]
I installed it a few years ago for short while on an install but I didn’t really need the use case then. Haven’t used it since.
Essentially, the plugin creates a new level of “network” in a multi-site installation and new, additional level of adminstrator. There are adminstrator users for individual sites, super-admins for a network of sites, and a global-admin that can traverse/manage all the networks… So with one WP multi-site installation (and one master user base, one set of plugins, one set of themes, etc), the sites can be organized into networks (what you think of as “multi-site”) with a global admin over all. IIRC, it also allows using unique domain names for each network.
As I’m looking to reorganize our program & some faculty sites on our DoOO, this kind of organization structure is looking attractive. I’m wondering if anybody has experience with it? Tom Woodward maybe?
I’ve never installed this myself however I know when I was at UMW it was how they structured their move to WordPress as a CMS for their main site umw.edu. They split up all the main colleges into their own multisites within the network so you had cas.umw.edu for College of Arts and Sciences then academics.umw.edu for all academic departments that didn’t fall under a college (like DTLT) and they were all subfolder multisites with individual departments having their own site. Beyond that I don’t know any other details and can’t really speak to the technical side of pros and cons since my role in that was solely as a user.
I think @jimgroom has played with it as well on UMW Blogs way back in the day as well though perhaps not much more beyond the experimentation stage.
That’s actually helpful news. On the faculty websites side, I’m thinking we’ve got to go withe more department/program oriented multisites instead of subdomains for each faculty. The DoOO subdomain concept w/ own WP install works for most full-time faculty, but with 89% of fac being part-time adjunct, the domain/own WP install is too much. Besides programs/depts are saying they want shared sites like a “economics glossary”. So I was thinking of going with a multi-network setup to simplify our admin of them.
If UMW has used it on the umw.edu site, then I presume Curtiss Grymala is involved? I know John James Jacoby, the author of the plugin, but it would be nice to be have another resource like Curtiss. He’s always been helpful in the past to me.
Yep Curtiss is the one involved with all that (he may have even modified the original network plugin to do some stuff specific to that setup if memory serves me correctly). He’d be a good person to talk to regarding how it’s working out since they’ve been in that setup for ~6 years now.
That was discussed in length a while back on the WP Campus slack group. Curtis chimed in if I recall correctly.