Manage multiple WordPress installs with InfiniteWP

What is InfiniteWP?

According to InfiniteWP:

InfiniteWP is a free, self-hosted multiple WordPress management platform that simplifies your WordPress management tasks into a simple click of a button.

Some real-world examples of when you’d use a service like this

at nvision, we build 99% of all of our applications on WordPress. This adds up to a LOT of websites in which common plugins in our toolbox are used, managing multiple user accounts and running regular updates to ensure the latest and greatest and most secure updates are present. A service such as InfiniteWP allows us to:

1. Install/Update Plugins to as many sites that are managed at ONCE as we’d like
2. Launch the admin of any of these sites without having to go to www.website.com/wp-admin. Why is this useful? We have various contributors at our company access admins through this method because it does not require them to have to log in directly :). This means as long as they can access the InfiniteWP tool, we don’t have to worry about how many people have access to various usernames and passwords across the board for all our clients.
3. Scheduled Backups
4. Manage Pages, Posts, and Comments
5. Prevent Malware and perform security updates

Some of these amazing features of their FREE service are premium add-ons 🙂 They are a small price to pay given the pricing model is not based on a per-site basis. This means if you’re running 1000 sites and managing them through infiniteWP, $69 add-on to keep them all secure using their industry recognizes Ithemes Security add-on is a small price to pay.

View more of their add-ons here.

How does it connect to my websites?

Very simple actually. They have a plugin “Client” that you upload to your WordPress site you’d like to manage, once activated it will show you:

1. Path to your /wp-admin directory
2. Username for the admin logged in
3. A random serialized string that it uses to authenticate access when defining a new install in your self-hosted infiniteWP
4. When you “add” a new site you simply need to just copy the above 3 pieces of information in the new install wizard and Boom goes the dynamite 🙂 You have now connected your WordPress site to the management tool

Is infiniteWP a hosted service?

No, infiniteWP is a self-hosted installation BUT the hosting requirements are very modest and as long as your server is running a semi-recent version of php and MySQL with Cron support you’ll be good to go.

How much does it cost?

As touched on before, this is free to use out of the box BUT they have some great add-ons which do cost a reasonable price. They have also since added an “enterprise” version of the management tool which allows for multiple users. This means if you want certain departments or staff at your company to only manage and have access to sites X,Y, and Z… You can now do that.

Let us know what you think and what add-ons you’ve taken for a test drive.