971434 - Migrate Mozilla Ireland to WordPress Multisite

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Participation Infrastructure :: MCWS, task)

Description

[Logan Rosen [:Logan]]

This is a bug that will track the migration of Mozilla Ireland to our new WordPress Multisite installation. We are doing this to ensure security and consistency across all Community IT-hosted websites.

The cooperation of the maintainer of this WordPress site will be crucial in getting this done. I have requested information from the person who appears to be most involved, but please let us know if there is someone else who controls it.

As part of this process, we will need to know what plugins are necessary, as we will have to reinstall them as part of the transition. Some may be incompatible, so flexibility will be required in some cases.

As for first steps, can we first get an OK from the current maintainer of the WordPress site for the eventual transfer to our WordPress Multisite installation?

Comment 1

[Brian King [:kinger]]

Hi Logan,

Is this initiative documented somewhere?

I have admin rights but Stephen is the site maintainer so I am adding him.

My only concern here is that there will be less flexibility and control for the site maintainers.

Comment 2

[Stephen M [:ste]]

Hi Logan,

Same query as Brian. Can you provide some documentation on this 'Multi site' set up and where this has been discussed within the community?

Comment 3

[tad]

C(In reply to Brian King [:kinger] from comment #1)
> Hi Logan,
> 
> Is this initiative documented somewhere?

Not comprehensively as of yet.
> I have admin rights but Stephen is the site maintainer so I am adding him.
> 
> My only concern here is that there will be less flexibility and control for
> the site maintainers.

This is a common concern. I have some thoughts on how we can address this :)
There are things we *have* to maintain to keep the platform stable, such as plugins, but this isn't much of an issue. Most community sites look exactly the same on the backend, using variations of the same plugins. We plan to provide the most configurable and powerful variation of needed plugins, so that communities can manage everything to their liking

In fact, it'll be a positive for the maintenance of sites. We will keep everything secure, updated and pre-configured, communities just change everything to their liking :)

Comment 4

[tad]

(In reply to Stephen M [sjmur] from comment #2)
> Hi Logan,
> 
> Same query as Brian. Can you provide some documentation on this 'Multi site'
> set up and where this has been discussed within the community?

No docs sadly. We're using these bugs to discuss it. There will be a call setup for us to present the project to you, and invite suggestions, questions and any concerns. We won't leave a concern unaddressed, and the migrations will be a reasonably slow process to ensure the highest standard of service. Correlation will be noticeable between the quality of our hosting services and the number of sites on wordpress multisite

Comment 5

[Stephen M [:ste]]

From reading it over on the wordpress codex (http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network) the idea itself sounds solid. So in practice there will be a Super Admin, or many, for all of the community sites.

These community sub sites will have their own admins like myself who can enable plugins,themes to their sub site. But the Wordpress core updates are managed by the Super Admins? 

If that is the case, it seems it will be business as usual from a local admin point of view. My main concern would be the consistency of the WordPress Core updates. WP updates often and its normally the major releases where we see breakages in the plugins. So of course it is best to always test the new releases before pushing them to community sites with various plugins.

Or, if of course viable, allow the local sites to update their own Wordpress core as they see fit? I am just going on what can be read from the above link.

Comment 6

[Benjamin Kerensa [:bkerensa]]

(In reply to Stephen M [sjmur] from comment #5)
> From reading it over on the wordpress codex
> (http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network) the idea itself sounds solid.
> So in practice there will be a Super Admin, or many, for all of the
> community sites.
> 
> These community sub sites will have their own admins like myself who can
> enable plugins,themes to their sub site. But the Wordpress core updates are
> managed by the Super Admins? 
> 
> If that is the case, it seems it will be business as usual from a local
> admin point of view. My main concern would be the consistency of the
> WordPress Core updates. WP updates often and its normally the major releases
> where we see breakages in the plugins. So of course it is best to always
> test the new releases before pushing them to community sites with various
> plugins.
> 
> Or, if of course viable, allow the local sites to update their own Wordpress
> core as they see fit? I am just going on what can be read from the above
> link.

I believe we could leave updates to site maintainers for feature releases but in the case a security release is issued we would need to upgrade automatically. With MU we can upgrade all the installs or leave it to maintainers to upgrade their individual install.

Comment 7

[Stephen M [:ste]]

(In reply to Benjamin Kerensa [:bkerensa] from comment #6)
> (In reply to Stephen M [sjmur] from comment #5)
> > From reading it over on the wordpress codex
> > (http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network) the idea itself sounds solid.
> > So in practice there will be a Super Admin, or many, for all of the
> > community sites.
> > 
> > These community sub sites will have their own admins like myself who can
> > enable plugins,themes to their sub site. But the Wordpress core updates are
> > managed by the Super Admins? 
> > 
> > If that is the case, it seems it will be business as usual from a local
> > admin point of view. My main concern would be the consistency of the
> > WordPress Core updates. WP updates often and its normally the major releases
> > where we see breakages in the plugins. So of course it is best to always
> > test the new releases before pushing them to community sites with various
> > plugins.
> > 
> > Or, if of course viable, allow the local sites to update their own Wordpress
> > core as they see fit? I am just going on what can be read from the above
> > link.
> 
> I believe we could leave updates to site maintainers for feature releases
> but in the case a security release is issued we would need to upgrade
> automatically. With MU we can upgrade all the installs or leave it to
> maintainers to upgrade their individual install.

So point releases of WP such as (3.1.x to 3.2.x) would be mandatory but feature releases (3.x to 4.x)could be upheld for the site admin(s). If this is the case then MU sounds good to go without worry of breaking plug-in and theme compatibility. 

Having an MU admin will also be helpful to those community admins who are not savvy with the WordPress CMS.

Comment 8

[Brian King [:kinger]]

I suggest:

- Community IT starts a discussion about this on Discourse
- Ping all the bugs like this one informing them of the discussion
- Once all the issues have been shaken out and an agreed approach is decided upon, circle back to the bugs

Comment 9

[Stephen M [:ste]]

Sounds good. Never heard of Discourse before.

Comment 10

[Tanner Filip [:tanner]]

Moving over to new Community IT components.

Comment 11

[Stephen M [:ste]]

What happened to Multisite Mozillaireland.org is now offline.

Comment 12

[Stephen M [:ste]]

Scratch that. It was offline for 10 minutes but is now back. Can someone give me an update on WPMS?

Comment 13

[matthew zeier [:mrz]]

WPMS stalled, lack of people time and resources. We are meeting early next week to figure out the path forward.

I am looking for contributors with a good understanding of Wordpress MS, AWS (specifically CloudFormation) and configuration management to help push this to completion.

Comment 14

[Logan Rosen [:Logan]]

WordPress Multisite is no longer a solution we are considering. We are looking at other ways to move our WordPress sites on shared hosting and VPSes. Closing this accordingly.

Comment 15

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Bulk move of bugs