Welcome to the WPCS Intro to platform series. In this 5 video intro series, you’ll learn how to leverage WordPress for SaaS. The first video is a high-level overview of all the concepts.
In the rest of this intro series, we’ll build on top of that knowledge by following a step-by-step process to build your first product.
At the end of the series, you’ll have created your first product and are ready to sell to customers right away.
Find the complete playlist on Youtube here or watch all the videos below.
Quick Overview
Creating a Product
Products can be utilized to organize your business. Some choose to place all their sites in one product, others like to organize them by business type. Of course, you’re encouraged to choose whatever arrangement fits your needs.
In this example, we’re using one product to sell restaurant websites, and another for real estate websites. Go ahead and head to the console to create your first product.
Building a Version
Versions contain the functionality of the product you’re creating. It is the main space for all future development of your theme, plugins, and language files. Whenever a new update of a plugin is available, and you want your customers to have those updates, it is done via the version.
If you rather wish to import an existing site into WPCS, it is entirely possible. View this recipe to learn more.
Snapshots
When you’re done working on your version and you’re ready to start offering it to customers, you create a Snapshot. This process is similar to when you want to update and maintain your customers’ websites.
Simply go into the version, make any changes, and deploy a new Snapshot. All changes you made will automatically be pushed out to your tenants in that version.
Note that no changes will be sent to any customer or tenant without the deployment of a Snapshot.
Deploying First Tenant
Using multi-tenant WordPress each of your customers is going to have an individual WordPress installation that shares a single WordPress codebase (the version). From the console, you can manually create a tenant.
All of this can be automated and can be completely scalable using our API. In order to have this, you’ll need several additional features on top of your version that together combine a storefront.
If that’s the direction you want to go, go ahead and start watching this series.