Some ideas for a WordPress SaaS to consolidate and maintain our different WordPress installations:

Plan could be to:

• Security
  • each site uses its OWN wordpress user
  • each site uses its OWN database credentials
  • the WordPress multisite installation will so share ONE user, that means it should be restricted to common plugins and themes, e.g. Akismet and the twenty-something
• Flavours
  • independant deployment: it should be easy to request its own WordPress (not easy like "web panel" but easy like "deploy that Salt state with just this new pillar change")
  • WordPress multisite: a deployment like the others, but shared for several sites
• WordPress core
  • deploy WordPress source code to /srv/wordpress: every WordPress site upgrades at the same time
  • disable auto-update at site level (will be automatically done by .git presence)
  • provide a custom update mechanism
    • it should first upgrade Git code, then run database migrations, then reload php-fpm (opcache!)
    • if we update a lot, could be nice to have our own specific php-fpm instance for the WordPress pools
    • also use a warmup script to load WordPress classes
• WordPress wp-content (plugins, themes, uploads)
  • each site has its own wp-content folder, this is mandatory to avoid
  • a wp-content folder = a ZFS filesystem
  • to store in /var/dataroot, like we do for MediaWiki (note MediaWiki don't use ZFS)
  • explore if we need a separate volume for content (for example if could allow easy snapshots in wp-content/ to upgrade and rollback, without rollbacking media uploaded)
  • explore if we can through ZFS provide a base volume for wp-content/ to clone, that would avoid several copies of the same base content
  • explore upgrade strategies: if we only auto update the core that creates an issue for non compatible plugins, and that still create a maintenance burden for other sites => a solution could be to encourage the use of the WordPress multisite

PHP configuration to improve:

• PHP extensions to add
  • exif
  • imagick
  • zip
• Post limit to raise, so we can have correct uploads
  • Max size of post data allowed: 8M (should be at least 64M)
  • Max size of an uploaded file: 2M (should be at least 64M)
  • Max effective file size: 2 MB (should be at least 64M)