Multi-tenant Components & Concepts
Multi-tenancy introduces a number of new concepts into WPCloudDeploy:
- Template Sites
- Versions
- Product Templates
- Site Types
Template Sites
Template sites are the sites on which all your tenant sites are based. It is the development version of your tenant sites.
Version
When you add a tenant, you are adding them to a particular version of a template site.
You can think of your template site as you development site. And the versions are the point-in-time snapshots that will be used to create your tenant sites.
Versions build upon Git Tags. Where-as a Git Tag gives you a point in time for a set of files, a WPCD template version includes a Git Tag for the files as well as a full clone of the template at the time the version was created.
- The full site is used for new tenants – this includes both the files and database.
- The Git Tagged files are used to upgrade existing tenants to new versions. Only files are upgraded on existing sites. To update the database you usually create a custom plugin that contains the database update logic.
When a new version is created from the Multi-tenant tab, a Git Tag is created as well as a full clone of the template site.
Product Template
A Product Template (aka WPCD Product) is another name for a template site. It’s, in effect, a synonym for the domain of the template site.
For example, the domain for your template site might be legalbusiness.mydomain.com. But you can set a name for the template to something more friendly such as “My Legal Business Template“.
You might find us using the term “template site”, “product template” and “WPCD Product” interchangeably.
One thing to keep in mind is that a PRODUCT TEMPLATE is NOT a WooCommerce product. They are very very different things.
A WooCommerce product can be based on a Product Template (template site) and multiple WooCommerce products can be defined against one Product Template (template site).
Site Types
Without Multi-tenancy, WPCloudDeploy deals with only two types of sites:
- Standard Sites
- Template Sites (If WooCommerce integration is activated)
The WPCloudDeploy Multi-tenant premium module adds quite a number of additional site types:
- Version Sites – these are clones of template sites that represent a version. They are used when creating sites for new tenants.
- Version Clone – these are Version Sites that are copied to other servers.
- Tenant Site – These are, well, tenant sites. There can be a mixture of standard sites and tenant sites on the same server or across multiple servers.
- Template Clones – These are templates that are copied to other servers. For now, there is no practical use for this but we’re keeping an open mind for future use.
More Topics In Multi-tenant
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