WordPress on VIP

WordPress application environments on VIP are provisioned with load-balanced pods running multiple containers such as batch containers (WP-CLI commands and WordPress Cron events), object cache (Memcached)/query cache, and SQL databases. 

A WordPress environment’s codebase combines core WordPress, platform-specific VIP MU plugins, and custom application code added to the application’s wpcomvip GitHub repository.

• Jetpack and Akismet are automatically installed and enabled for all WordPress sites and registered with the VIP machine user wpcomvip. This machine user is required for managing Jetpack connections and should not be removed. For security reasons, logins for the wpcomvip user are disabled.
• Themes and plugins can only be installed, updated, or deleted via the application’s wpcomvip GitHub repository; they cannot be installed, updated, or deleted in the WordPress Admin dashboard.
• Unlike traditional WordPress installs, media files are stored, managed, and globally distributed by the VIP File System at the edge, which is an object store that is separate from an application’s web containers. Media files that are uploaded to a WordPress environment will load with the expected file path /wp-content/uploads/.
• Because the WordPress VIP Platform uses NGINX (not Apache), there are no .htaccess files. The directives defined in NGINX are platform-wide and cannot be customized per-site.