Need recommendations for software to manage multiple WP installs

  • By way of a quick intro, I am new to the WordPress forum but not new to WordPress. After looking through the other forum topic lists, I thought this would be the single best place to post this question. (I am not using MU, but have many multiple sites.) Please forgive a new registration doing an opening post, but this seemed the best place.

    I very much need any and all recommendations for any type of software designed to deal with multiple WordPress sites. Upgrades have become rather time-consuming. When a new version comes out, I load an Excel spreadsheet of user names and passwords and manually go into each site for upgrading versions and plugins. Back when I only had a few dozen sites installed, that was manageable.

    It is likely I am just not using the proper keywords to get useful SERPs with selections of software for this purpose. I tried looking for WordPress site managers, WordPress password software, WP user management, etc. – a number of other search phrases, and also ran those searches against this forum’s posts.

    After several hours of this, a couple of potentially useful results were returned, but did not address preferred features. One was a monthly subscription, which I don’t do. One was designed for doing mass installs. One login manager was a plugin that tracked updates through a MU site – that one made me paranoid about installing something like that on the servers.

    Does anyone here know of a Windows application designed to manage multiple WordPress installations? …code that can be trusted with site passwords? Tracking users and passwords is a must, version tracking of a database of plugins by site would be a help, site modification changes by date would be a plus, something that is from a trusted publisher that could be password protected is vital. Preference is for a paid commercial product that stores all data on my computer, and has no code on the servers.

    Thank you for any and all assistance you may be able to provide, Ken

    P.S. Also, if anyone knows of any books or other software that can help with maintenance of large quantities of sites, that would also be quite helpful :~)

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • (I am not using MU, but have many multiple sites.)

    This section of the forum is for people using multisite.

    If you have a LOT of sites, and many of them are on the same server… roll them in to multisite. then you update them once.

    Thread Starter KenW3

    (@kenw3)

    Andrea, Thank you for your reply. Perhaps you can please suggest where this query should be posted? It may be appropriate for Advanced, but I cannot post there.

    Someone has to have had this difficulty and determined a resolution. Yes, there are a lot of sites. There are 30 on my personal hosting service, with a couple hundred others across four hosting companies, some of which are on their own private servers.

    If anyone knows of a Windows application designed to manage multiple WordPress installations… If anyone has any ideas on how to proceed, this has gotten a bit out of hand, and the recent 3.1 update exposed the difficulty that is ever increasnig as sites are added.

    As you state this is the exclusive domain of MU queries, and not for help with multiple-site difficulties, is there a more appropriate venue for help that is desperately needed?

    If I were you, I would definitely consider moving many of the sites into one multisite installation.

    As Andrea says: maybe a multi-network or domain mapping with a multisite installation.
    Another option might be “backup buddy”: this lets you create a site template and import it to a create a new blog: this lets you have sites at multiple IP addresses or servers (which you might need if you are managing lots of client blogs or niche blogs for example). Not sure how a multisite would go for these applications (eg if you needed to hand the sites over to the client or a purchaser.)

    Thread Starter KenW3

    (@kenw3)

    Thank you very much for your replies. I will continue to search for a solution to user login management and offsite maintenance database software.

    @dallasm I had looked at Backup Buddy as a potential solution for backups, but not for installs. For the install process, wpdesktop.com had a more elegant solution. It was even more simple, though, to just drag completely configured sites (based on structure) from temporary holding folders, and just overwrite the files specific to the new site.

    @andrea_r Thank you very much for your activity on this forum. You have taught me far more than you know with your responses to various posts across this BBS :~) I did not pursue MU due to the additional complexities it seemed to introduce to the process.

    I had looked at creativeimplementations.com/manage-multiple-wordpress-sites-you-need-this/ software as one potential solution to monitoring sites. This is a plugin for a status dashboard, but did not address an offsite database with a password and login method to provide means by which to address the processes it monitors.

    I considered joejacobs.org/software/yet-another-multi-site-manager/ for use with an MU site, but this did not address the feature set preferred, including the preference for a paid commercial package and still no login abilities for management.

    CP-Lab.com and RoboForm provide useful software for password and site login management, but these are not specific to WP. They’d be useful with a changelog database specific to WP webmaster changes, active site monitoring, and some way to maintain an offline user database by site that shows user level permissions.

    The reason for the search is the hope that, due to the popularity of this CMS, some software publisher somewhere would have addressed this need. Even someone with just a few sites would benefit. An excel spreadsheet for all of these functions is just not a suitable solution, but does provide temporary function when a fully relational, CMS specific database is not published anywhere (that I have found so far :~)

    Thank you very much, Ken

    Ken,

    We’re in a very similar position – multiple client sites that require updating with each version release. Did you find a manageable solution? Was Backup Buddy helpful at all?

    Multi site is not an option for us and we’re also looking to replace the Excel spreadsheet approach.

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    This section of the forum is for MultiSite.

    You can try something like WP Hive, but in short, if you’re not asking about WP MultiSite, this is the wrong subforum ??

    Closing this post.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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