[Ed Beck]

This week over in SUNY, we had a problem with a non-Commons In Box plugin that broke one of our subsites, to the point that we were unable to view the site or even view the backend to turn the plugin off.

It’s one of those worst case scenario moments, and everything is fine now, but it got Amanda and I thinking and talking about Plugin Management for WordPress Multisite a little bit. I know that there are WordPress Multisite Plugins around that claim to be able to do things like:

• List what sites are actually using a plugin or theme.
• Deactivate a plugin across all sites.
• Mark a plugin so that only Super Admins can enable it. (use case: maybe there is a plugin that you used make available, but you want to de-emphasize without taking it away from current users or breaking old sites)

So my question is two parts:

1. Is anyone using a plugin to help them administratively manage plugins?
2. Is this a gap that Commons in a Box could fill eventually, either by incorporating a plugin into the community plugins area or building on existing code to bring those features into Commons in a Box?

Free plugins: I am aware of these through searching, not through actual testing are things like

• Multisite Enhancements by Frank Bultge,
• Multisite Plugin Manger by Aaron Edwards (possibly not maintained for current versions)

Premium plugins: I found Campus Press has two plugins that they don’t share

• Deprecation Manager “For when it comes time to retire a plugin or theme. Set a sunset date, show admin warning, restrict usage, and choose which theme to activate after deprecation.”
• Plugin Manager “Configure which plugins are available on which sites, which are auto-activated, or which are hidden. Also, rename plugins and add customized links to documentation.”

Does anyone have experience with any of the plugins above (positive or negative)?

[Troy Welch]

Hi Ed, I admin a couple of mid-size WP multisites and a couple of smaller CBox ones.

I am running both Multisite Enhancements and Multisite Plugin Manager on our two mid-size servers. They seem to function just fine. There was one small issue with Multisite Enhancements involving favicons. If I recall it was initially sorted with some developer code that turned the feature off and/or/possibly with some patch code on the github for the plugin.

The main thing I find useful about Multisite Enhancements is that it tells you which subsites are using a theme or plugin. (column in the admin themes/plugin columns).

I use the Multisite Plugin Manager for a few purposes:

-keeping administrator/dangerous/security risk plugins out of the hands of individual users (Query Monitor, anything that writes custom code (be it JS, PHP or CSS) into pages, or advanced plugins that might require special oversight)

-this also leaves users with a less overwhelming plugin list

-we also use it for soft deprecation of plugins. As you know plugins/themes are a source of technical debt in the WordPress realm. The Plugin Manager has a functionality where if you turn a plugin off for general use it will remain active on subsites where it is already active but will disappear from the list once deactivated.

Both of these plugins come in handy for soft deprecation. When we are wanting to get rid of a plugin or theme ME gives us a small list of blog owners we need to contact. We generally give them a couple of weeks to make other arrangements and typically I try to find something that replaces the functionality. (For older servers it will often be the Gutenberg Block editor that replaces plugin/theme functionality.) I won’t rant about themes that contain code that belongs in plugin.

In any event, both of these plugins are still useful imho.

Cheers

[Ed Beck]

Troy,

Thank you for your response. I really appreciate your experience and you taking the time to share that.

[Bree]

Thanks Ed, for starting this thread, and Troy for weighing in!

At the City Tech OpenLab we do this manually, but are interested in learning about plugins that others are using.

Bree 🙂

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