Chapter 5: Using Network Plugins and Themes
- Understanding theme management
- Understanding network-wide plugins
- Finding network-wide and Must-Use plugins
When you add new plugins and themes to your WordPress installation, you add new functionality and aesthetics. However, you don't just multiply your choices; the possibilities become endless. For example, you can gather and display information from across the network or have the same features available to everyone. You can choose to have the same theme on all sites or different themes. Not only can you manage plugins and themes on a global level, you also have site-specific control.
In this chapter, we cover having certain functionality appear across the network and having certain plugins active by default on all sites for all users. We also cover controlling access to different themes for different sites.
One of the interesting features of a network is the extensive use of the mu-plugins folder. In this chapter, we describe exactly how this folder processes plugin code. We also cover the Network Activate link on the Plugins page, which is very similar to the Activate link but has important differences.
When you have a single installation of WordPress on a single site, the Activate link on the plugin page turns that plugin on for that site (see Book VII, Chapters 1 and 2). When you have multiple sites in a network, the activate link works the same way for the site you activate the plugin on.
Network Admins will see a Network Activate link on the Plugins page in the Network Admin Dashboard, which activates the plugin on all sites in the network. This will simply turn the plugin on for all network sites. It will not allow you to manage plugin options globally unless the plugin itself was coded to do so. A list of network activated plugins will be shown in the Plugins page in the Network Admin Dashboard (Network Admin
Plugins).
This chapter doesn't cover installing plugins and themes. We cover plugins in Book VII, Chapter 2 and themes in Book VIII, Chapter 2.