Home Managing Your Network

Managing Your Network

Juliana Dias
By Juliana Dias
7 articles

Understanding your Dashboard (v2)

IMPORTANT NOTE: This article refers to WP Ultimo version 2.x. WP Ultimo v2 has a dedicated Dashboard under the WP Ultimo menu, but it also adds some sections to the Network Dashboard. This article will explain the sections you will see both on the Network and the WP Ultimo Dashboards. The Network Dashboard: WP Ultimo injects a few useful widgets into the network-level dashboard. This dashboard is found by navigating to My Sites > Network Admin > Dashboard. The widgets are designed to provide easy access to information and common operations for the network administrator. This is how the network dashboard should look: Now, let's take a look at each widget of the network dashboard: First Steps: This widget predominantly appears on a fresh installation of WP Ultimo such as ours and reminds the network administrator to complete additional tasks, like configuring a payment method and create a test account. Summary: The summary widget reports the number of signups and the revenue for the day. The MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) indicates a projected total across customers with revenue-generating memberships. Activity Stream: This widget reports on events across WP Ultimo for which there is a variety to report on. Events could include aspects such as signups, cancellations, creations, and deletions of sites and other activities. Right Now: This utility widget displays a short summary of users and sites in the network. Handy shortcuts at the top allow for one-click access to create new sites or users. News & Discussions: This widget fetches and displays the latest WP Ultimo news. It is advantageous to keep an eye on this widget for information about updates, critical bugs, and security fixes. The WP Ultimo Dashboard: While the network dashboard presents holistic information about the network, the WP Ultimo dashboard located at the top-level of the WP Ultimo menu presents information about the service. Welcome Tour: On a fresh installation of WP Ultimo v2 a brief welcome tour is displayed familiarizing the network administrator with the dashboard and its new functions. Documentation: At the top of the dashboard lies the Documentation link. The documentation (this documentation) contains a wealth of information regarding the installation, operation, support, and maintenance of WP Ultimo as well as ancillary information designed to be helpful to the network administrator. The documentation link is prevalent on most WP Ultimo pages providing contextual help when called upon. Thus when working with sites, for example, the documentation link will provide help related to the creation and management of network sites. Monthly Recurring Revenue Growth: Leading from the network-level widget the MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) displays a monthly breakdown of revenue over a 12 month calendar period. New revenue is shown in blue while cancellations, in red. Date-range Support: Depending on the number of customers, activity, and type of information statistics soon become overwhelming, difficult to find, and difficult to interpret. The date-range support built into the dashboard allows the network administrator to focus on only the information and information period required. The date range governs the period of the information displayed by the widgets directly below. Revenue: The total revenue for the period. MRR stands for Monthly Recurring Revenue. You also have a detailed description of the revenue per product. New Memberships: How many new memberships were created on your network for the period you have selected. Signups by Countries: An overview of how many users signed up to your network are on each country. Signups by Forms: On this section you can see how many customers signed up to your network using your main checkout form - and any other checkout form that you have - and how many were added by the super admin(s) of the network. Most Visited Sites: The most visited websites of your network. To make this function work, you need to enable the visit counting function at WP Ultimo > Settings > Sites > Enable Visits Limitation and Counting.

Last updated on Oct 16, 2023

Managing Customers

The Customers page will show you the list of members registered in your network. This page displays basic user information including name and email address, last login, and also a switch to link that will allow you to log in to the user's subsite as a site administrator instead of a super admin account. If you click on Manage*,* right below a customer's card, you will be redirected to a page with more information regarding this specific customer. Right at the At a Glance block, you can see the customer ID, thelast login time and the total grossed (spent) by this customer. On the Customer Options block, you can set this customer as a VIP by toggling the VIP option on. This setting does not change anything to your customers, it is just a tag - like a favorite tag - which makes easier to find a customer. On the Billing Info tab, you can see the billing information for this customer (e-mail, address, country, etc..). On the Fields block, you can see again the customer username, email and you are able to change the Email Verification status to verified, pending or none. Right below the Customer Options block, we can see four other blocks: Memberships, Payments, Sites and Events. They are self-explanatory: they show the current membership(s) the customer is subscribed to; the customer's payments history; the sites this customer owns; and the events related to this customer, like an email verification, a billing information change, etc... If you need to change anything related to these fields, you can click on the arrow icon (>) and it will redirect you to the specific page for this field. For example, if we click on the arrow icon next to the website of the customer, we will be redirected to this specific website edit page, where you can edit the membership associated with it, the site type, if it is active or not, etc... The same happens if you click on the arrow icon next to a membership or payment. You will be redirected to their pages where you can edit the membership status, the customer associated with this membership, add a new product to the membership, etc... Or in the case of a payment, you can generate an invoice for this payment, change the membership which the payment was made for, change the payment gateway, and even refund the payment. The last blocks of the Customers page, which are on the right of the Memberships, Payments, Sites and Events blocks, are the Last Login & IPs, Timestamps and Delete blocks. On these blocks, you can see the last login, IP address and country of the customer; you can see when the customer account was created and the last time it was modified; and you can even delete the customer. Be aware that if you delete a customer, you will not be able to restore it back.

Last updated on Oct 16, 2023

Managing Sites

Sites or Subsites are basically the bread and butter of your business. In this article, we will discuss how to manage and distinguish each type of site as well as what information is linked or connected to it. WP Ultimo has 3 types of sites: Customer-owned which are sites under specific customers; Site templates which are your pre-defined sites that customers select as boilerplate; and Regular WP sites which are plain regular subsites in your multisite installation. How to add a new site To add a new site, you just simply click the Add Site button and a modal window will appear. You need to fill in the site title, site domain/path and choose the site type. add new site The Copy Site toggle button will allow you to create a new site based on a site template. If you choose to enable this field, you will be given an additional field to select a site template. add new site Make sure that the Copy Media on Duplication option is enabled then click the Add new Site button to complete the process. How to manage existing sites To manage the Sites, you can go to WP Ultimo menu and find the Sites option. This will bring up the Sites page which will show the list of subsites within your network. Notice that each site is labeled based on its type. sites page Then click the Manage button to get to the Edit Site page. On this page, basic information will be displayed, like the site name, site typ e, site ID, description. It will also show the mapped domain, the membership or plan it is under, and the customer account that owns the site. The Site Options section will allow you to manage the site's capabilities. These include setting limits and quotas for the site. By default, it follows the limits and quotas set on the membership level. Setting the limits on the site level will supersede the membership settings. These include limiting the number of site visits, the number of user accounts per user roles, limiting user roles and disk space, and enabling custom domain or domain mapping. site options In this section, you can also set how the plugins and themes will behave under this site. You can configure whether it will be visible or hidden and whether it will be pre-activated or just available for the user to have an option to use it. Right below the site options is some information about the mapped domains associated with the site, the membership plan the site is under, and the customer account linked to the site. This section will help you to easily navigate through the associated or linked entities to the site. On the right-hand side, you can enable or disable the site there is a toggle button that will allow you to easily enable or disable the site. site activation You can also find a metabox that will allow you to change the site type or reassign the site to another owner or user. site type There is also an option to set the site imag e or thumbnail, which is the image that will show on the front end if the site is a site template. site image Should you need to delete the site, there is a button that will allow you to do it, just note that this action is irreversible which means that the site cannot be reinstated once it is deleted. delete site

Last updated on Oct 16, 2023

Managing Payments and Invoices

Manage payments in WP Ultimo is as easy as it gets. You can set the auto-renew, allow trials and configure invoices. In version 2.0 you can set different payment gateways to fulfill your customers needs. Currently, you can enable payments via Stripe, Stripe Checkout, PayPal or receive manually. General Payment Settings To access your payment settings go to your WP Ultimo Settings page and navigate to the Payments tab. There you will find the general options to your payments management. The options affect how prices are displayed on the frontend, the backend and in reports. Force Auto-Renew: Toggle this option to create new memberships with auto-renew activated (if the gateway supports it) or deactivated. When deactivated an auto-renew option will be shown during checkout. Allow Trials without Payment Method: Enable this option to only ask for a payment method when the trial period is over. Send Invoice on Payment Confirmation: Enabling this option will attach a PDF invoice (marked paid) with the payment confirmation email. Invoice Numbering Scheme: Decide what kind of numbering scheme should be used on the invoices. You can choose between Payment Code or Sequential Number. If you choose the last option, define the next invoice number and the invoice number prefix. Enabling Payment Gateways You can activate up to four methods of payment on our payment settings page: Stripe, Stripe Checkout, PayPal and Manual. Stripe: Toggle this option to activate Stripe payment. Fill the blanks with the Stripe Publishable and Secret Key and save. This method will show a space to insert the credit card number during the checkout. Stripe Checkout: Toggle this option to activate Stripe Checkout payment. Fill the blanks with the Stripe Publishable and Secret Key and save. This method will redirect the customer to a Stripe Checkout page during the checkout. PayPal: Toggle this option to activate PayPal as a payment method. Fill the blanks with PayPal credentials that you can get in your PayPal account dashboard. This method will redirect the customer to a PayPal payment page during the checkout. Note: you can activate Sandbox mode on all these gateways to test if the payment method is working Manual: Toggle this option to enable manual payments from your customers. You should write the payment instructions on the box. The message will be displayed to the customer on the “Thank you” page, after the checkout. Confirming manual payments To confirm a manual payment, go to the Payments menu on the left bar. There you can see all the payments on your network and their details, including their status. A manual payment will always have a Pending status until you manually change it. Enter the payment page by clicking the reference code. On this page you have all the details of the pending payment, such as reference ID, products, timestamps and more. On the right column, you can alter the status of the payment. Changing it to Completed and toggling the Activate Membership option will enable your customer’s site and their membership will be active. You can also generate the payment's invoice by clicking on the button on the top of the page. Customizing Invoices WP Ultimo allows you to customize the invoices you send to your customers. To do it, navigate to Payments page. On the right column, on the Invoices box, click to Go to Customizer. On the right side, you can alter general configurations (text on the paid tag, font-family, and content on footer), colors, and images, where you can alter the logo. You can see the changes immediately on the template preview and save them clicking to Save Invoice Template, on the right column.

Last updated on Oct 16, 2023

Managing System Emails

Reseting & Importing system emails New WP Ultimo versions, as well as add-ons, can and will register new emails from time to time. To prevent conflicts and other issues, we won't add the new email templates as System Emails on your install automatically, unless they are crucial to the correct functioning of a given feature. However, super admins and agents can import this newly registered emails via the importer tool. That process will create a new system email with the content and configuration of the new email template, allowing the super admin to make any modifications they want or keep them as is. How to import system emails Go to your WP Ultimo Settings page and head to the Emails tab. Then, on the sidebar, click on the Customize System Emails button. On the System Emails page, you'll see the Reset & Import action button on the top. Clicking that button should open the import and reset modal window. Then, you can toggle the Import Emails options to see which system emails are available to be imported. Reseting System Emails Other times, you'll realize that the changes you made to a given email template are not working for you anymore and you'd like to reset it to their default state. In such cases, you have two options: you can simply delete the system email and import it back (using the instructions above) - which will erase send metrics and other things, which makes this method least preferred. Or you can use the Reset & Import tool to reset that email template. To reset an email template, you can follow the steps above until you reach the Reset & Import tool, and then, toggle the Reset option and select the emails you want to reset back to their default content.

Last updated on Oct 16, 2023