Orion Multisite Support and Various New Features

During our quest to reach the Orion roadmap milestones, we often overlooked minor improvements because we wanted to focus your attention on the good stuff. I’ll use this article to answer a couple of question that keep popping up from time to time, and to introduce a couple of minor new features.

Will Orion Support Multisite Installations?

TL;DR Yes.

Initially, we said no to multisite support, because we felt that we needed to focus everything on single site WordPress installations. ManageWP was originally envisioned as a way to bring all the multisite advantages to stand alone installations, without any of the drawbacks. It made sense for us to stop thinking about covering every single possible need you might have, and focus on the important ones.

But then, something wonderful happened. You started expressing your concern how this will impact your business in our comment section. You started emailing us about this. We even had a couple of talks with some of you who know us personally. And they weren’t the “I’m dropping ManageWP if you don’t comply” angry kind of talks. They were the “I’ll still be happy to use ManageWP, but I’ll have to set up a parallel management system” kind of talks.

We realized we were wrong to say no.

You see, ManageWP is all about you. Taking care of your business, helping you automate your workflow, so you could take care of more important matters. And sometimes, you can’t choose not to use a multisite – be it a client with a multisite website, or a project where using a multisite would be a huge benefit.

So we decided to do the right thing and keep supporting multisite management in ManageWP.

Multisite installations will be supported to an extent that does not require a complete rewrite of the tools. This means that every Orion tool except Clone and Backup will work with multisite installations (these two pretty much need to be redesigned from the ground up, which is in itself a huge project).

We’re trying to stay on track with the development, so I can’t give you an ETA for the multisite support. It will definitely be before the Classic dashboard gets phased out, tho.

Thank you for caring about ManageWP so much that you were ready to fight us over it. It just goes to show that the term “WordPress community” really stands for something.

This brings me to another important matter that we reconsidered, and that is…

Multiple Google Analytics Accounts on a Single ManageWP Dashboard

This is another idea we initially dropped. Google has a cap on the number of requests to their GA servers. Having 200,000+ websites regularly pull data from the GA server would generate a lot of traffic, and we’d need to MacGuyver some kind of load balancer to make things work. We kept digging anyway. Luckily, after a couple of talks with Google, we found out that we could raise the cap by becoming a Technology Partner.

We’re currently in the process of becoming certified, but I can safely say at this point that once it’s done, you will be able to add as many Google Analytics accounts to your ManageWP account as you need.

Performance and Security Checks Are Now in the Orion Client Report

The Client Report is getting some love with the Performance and Security Check integration. You are now able to send your clients a summary of these checks, and show them that their websites are taken care of.

client-report-security

Orion Bottom Bar Becomes the Top Bar

The six years of experience with ManageWP taught us that the hardest part of building ManageWP is making it user friendly and intuitive. That’s why we have a dedicated UX team, and keep running unorthodox experiments to find ways to improve it – like hiring a drunk UX expert to review our site (don’t try this at home).

When you log into your Orion dashboard, you’ll notice that the top bar is now home to your Orion tools:

orion-top-bar

The reason behind the move from the bottom to the top is that there are so many different tools in Orion, a new user could easily miss the bottom bar. So we moved it to a more prominent position at the top.

We also simplified the sidebar by moving the thumbnail/list selector to the far right.

list-thumbnail-redesign

Yeah, it will take A LOT of trial and error to achieve perfection. Thank you for sticking with us on this journey.

Stay tuned, we’ve got another Orion milestone coming this week!

Nemanja Aleksic Avatar

26 responses

  1. petaqui Avatar
    petaqui

    As usual… AWESOME guys!! You rock 🙂 Keep working hard, and we will keep spreading love around you =)

  2. geraldjim Avatar
    geraldjim

    One of the great things about you guy’s is that you listen and talk to your users. Great set of improvements

  3. Wayne van Elsen Avatar
    Wayne van Elsen

    We are super impressed with the new Orion platform. It was the main reason we are using ManageWP.

    And our clients love the new reports 🙂

  4. ellegaard Avatar
    ellegaard

    Once again you amaze me. Just as I thought, that I had found that one thing that I could be bitching about, you turn around and makes it part of the package.
    You are making it really hard to be unsatisfied!!! 🙂

  5. Surbma Avatar
    Surbma

    I’m managing only Multisites. Just moved all my sites from ManageWP, because the lack of Multisite support in Orion. I would be more than happy to bring back all my sites to you. Good work guys, just keep on listening! 🙂

  6. ARS Cons. Avatar
    ARS Cons.

    OMG OMG OMG OMG …. Multisite support, yes!!!

    You say “every Orion tool except Clone and Backup will work with multisite installations (these two pretty much need to be redesigned from the ground up, which is in itself a huge project).”

    I’d have a hard time performing updates on a live site without a backup to revert back to… what do you suggest I/we do ?

    We use Codeguard for large complex sites, is that the (only) way to go ? (since you know backups on shared hosting s-cks 😉

  7. info@dicm.dk Avatar
    info@dicm.dk

    Multisite support … THANK YOU!

  8. Entropic Studio Avatar
    Entropic Studio

    THANK YOU!! When you said that you weren’t supporting multi-sites, a small piece of my heart broke.

    But it’s back now!

    Thank you!

  9. kontakt@punktbar.de Avatar
    kontakt@punktbar.de

    This really sounds awesome, especially we will have a new client with a multisite … and I just was worried how to manage all that because of backups and updating.
    I love the reports! Looking forward to customisations (especially with other languages).

    cu Frank, from germany

  10. Hamid Peya Avatar
    Hamid Peya

    I am happy for this news and glad to see Orion growing the way it should be. But one of the most important and basic thing that should be at the first priority of next update is restore, migrating and clone ability in Orion. No doubt Orion is more reliable backup dashboard than classic version but without filling this gap it is incomplete. What i am saying is backup, restore, migrate, clone should be available in same time and in working versions. (Not in beta). I am currently experiencing a bad time for migrating and cloning my site with Managewp. I will not write the whole experience here but only one thing, update the Orion for migrating and cloning tools.

    Thanks.

  11. Rick de Jong Avatar
    Rick de Jong

    Perhaps I’m missing something. But how do I add multisites? I’ve network activated the worker plugin, but when connecting it doesn’t work. What should I do?

  12. dale@118group.com Avatar
    dale@118group.com

    The Orion UI is really coming along. Nice work.

  13. elindydotcom@hotmail.com Avatar
    elindydotcom@hotmail.com

    I would give my right arm for multi-site support on backup. There are a number of plugin tools that already handle backup for multisite so even if is a case of Orion just triggering those tools to do their job (so we can control it all from the dashboard) I would take that! Examples of these tools include snapshot (wpmuvdev.com), nsclone (neversettle.it) and WP Migrate Pro (deliciousbrains.com). They each have specific capabilities that can be triggered on demand so if the first version of multisite backup is just to figure out how to integrate with one or more of these that would be awesome. No point in spending years on this project. (yes, I own two of the three and will buy the third one soon).

  14. elindydotcom@hotmail.com Avatar
    elindydotcom@hotmail.com

    One more thing – some hosting providers are pretty good about backups as well. For example, maybe there’s a way to trigger a WPENGINE snapshot. It might require working with their tech folks to make it happen but that would be pretty cool since their backups are almost instantaneous – unless you want to download the backup off their servers but even so, having an automatic snapshot once per hour with a download once per day for multisite installs would be phenomenal!

  15. andy@daytwo.io Avatar
    andy@daytwo.io

    How’s the progress on multiple Google Analytics accounts coming? I’m curious if I read that correctly, that currently it’s not possible but you guys are working on it? I have one Google Analytics account with multiple websites on there and it would be great to see that stats for each one of those sites 🙂 Thank you guys for such a great system!

  16. thollenbeck1@gmail.com Avatar
    thollenbeck1@gmail.com

    We have over 200 sites on ManageWP Classic. Our whole business runs based on our ability to access and input on these sites. In the last few days, all of a sudden we have been shut out as it has told us that it is being moved to Orion!! This is going to put us out of business in a couple of weeks it we cannot get this access re-established…. Happy to pay ManageWP to help but please someone HELP!!

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