Wordpress Multisite sucks

Community Ops WordPress
#1

Myself and Logan (especially Logan, huge kudos to him for working so hard on this) have spent countless hours trying to figure out WPMS.

After much investigation, writing custom code, making unreasonable amounts of changes to things that should work out of the box, we’re close to concluding that Wordpress Multisite is not the right implementation of Wordpress.

It just doesn’t work, here’s why:

  • Preview doesn’t work on multisite with domain mapping
  • Random redirect loops
  • Custom code to make SSL work (we’re an operations team, we shouldn’t be maintaining a code base)
  • No good way to implement SES at network level.
  • Tedious setup of new sites

We’ve had an idea of setting up a managed wordpress style infra, and are developing a POC https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1107537

I’m liking this solution so far because it works really really well with no issues, using http://mainwp.com as a dashboard

We still get high control, community members won’t get access to plugin/theme installation etc through user permissions.

Thoughts?

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#2

Would like to see some documentation the planned architecture for this Wordpress-as-a-Service (WaaS) for us to review at the next team meeting. I don’t want to just rubber stamp this without some input from a wider audience.

  • How will instances be managed?
  • How will this WaaS - instances & database - scale or autoscale?
  • How do we ensure S3 storage for media content/themes?

I always like to lead with requirements but as I tried to write them down, I came up with only two high level requirements:

@logan & @tad - as module owners, you should take the lead at a draft proposal that we can discuss.

(Though this Sunday I’ll be back on a plane from Chicago to San Francisco - perhaps we can schedule it for some other time when the right people can join?)

#3

According to the wiki (thanks @mrz for pointing it out) you have wordfence and wordpress-https installed. Could these cause some of the problems?

  • What happens if you run wordpress without wordfence?
  • What redirect loops are you talking about?
  • How come SSL doesn’t work?

I bet you did try a lot of solutions, but can you explain more in depth the issues? Or is there some documentation about it (etherpad/wiki)?

Is there anywhere else we can see the progress being made apart from the wiki?

On a side note, mainwp seems like a nice to have feature. Whatever gets you more automation :smile:

#4

Oh look, exactly the kind of questions that would be answered by regular progress comments in relevant bugs :wink: See people do want to know!

#5

Well, the problem isn’t that the plugins are bad, it’s just that they aren’t comprehensive and nobody keeps them up to date.

Logan basically rewrote a whole HTTPS plugin which got us further but not where we needed to be.

The redirect loops are very random on login pages, and we can’t reproduce it frequently enough to debug.

WordFence doesn’t break stuff.

Right now I’m experimenting with container based wordpress using docker, managed by tutum which seems to be a very good solution. It works well, gives us a really high level of security and easy to load balance.

#6

Perhaps there’s a way to share more what your thinking of with Tutum & mainwp so others can help participate?

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#7

Uhm very strange, i’ve used Multisite with subdomains without problem.
maybe we can ask to the official Wordpress community.

#8

It wasn’t an issue with subdomains as much as an issue with domain mapping.