Multisite Office Hours Recap (February 24, 2015)

Multisitemultisite Used to describe a WordPress installation with a network of multiple blogs, grouped by sites. This installation type has shared users tables, and creates separate database tables for each blog (wp_posts becomes wp_0_posts). See also network, blog, site office hours are held every Tuesday at 21:00UTC in #core-multisite and are followed by a casual bugbug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority. scrub / ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. conversation at 22:00 UTC.

We had a great conversation in office hours today around networknetwork (versus site, blog) types as a follow-up to some of the discussion generated by the network types thread from last week.

I think the chat log is the best place to get a full picture of this one as we covered a lot of material and several possible approaches.

In short:

  • We’re trying to balance “decisions, not options” with a configuration that has many possible permutations. One way to do this would be a list of checkboxes covering each setting during network setup. It seems everyone agrees that it is much more desirable to have a limited interface to make the option easier.
  • While discussion on the network types thread tended to covered the ability to register new types and filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. existing types, the conversation today took an interesting turn toward a model where a small number of key options were offered during network setup.
  • The most important options we should start with in building this out are: (a) Allow new users to register – Yes/No, (b) Allow users to create sites – Yes/No.
  • With each of these questions, we narrow down a set of options (see @johnbillion‘s quick list) to define the “network type”.
  • It’s possible a 3rd or 4th question is useful, though we agreed that starting with these two questions would be a route to progress.
  • We can repurpose #30145 away from our loved and then unloved, but always confusing wp_is_trusted_network() to something along the lines of “Introduce better default settings during network creation” (credit @ipstenu).

I think that grasps the overall intent of today’s conversation. The entire log is a good read. Please leave feedback here and in the network types thread as you have it! 🙂

#meeting, #multisite