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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/query cache (memcached), and databases (MariaDB). 

  • Jetpack and Akismet are automatically installed and enabled for all WordPress sites. Jetpack, Akismet, and VaultPress are registered with the VIP machine user wpcomvip. This machine user is required for managing Jetpack connections and should not be removed. Logins for the wpcomvip user are restricted.
  • Because the WordPress VIP Platform uses NGINX (not Apache), there are no .htaccess files. 
  • PHP’s memory_limit is by default set to 512M, and WP_MEMORY_LIMIT is set to 40MB for WordPress single sites, and 64MB for WordPress multisites. If a site’s WP_MEMORY_LIMIT is set to a value higher than memory_limit, WordPress will allow WP_MEMORY_LIMIT to override the PHP memory_limit.
  • The 500 most recent post revisions are stored. The number of revisions stored and the intervals for autosaves can be customized.

Codebase

A WordPress environment’s codebase is a combination of core WordPress, platform-specific vip-go-mu-plugins, and custom application code added to the wpvip GitHub repository.

Themes and plugins can only be installed, updated, or deleted via the application’s wpvip GitHub repository; they cannot be installed, updated, or deleted in the WordPress admin dashboard.

Media files

Media files uploaded to a WordPress production environment will load with the expected file path /wp-content/uploads/. Unlike traditional WordPress installs, media files are stored, managed, and globally distributed by the VIP File System at the edge, which is separate from the web containers.

Gutenberg

The Gutenberg block editor is built into WordPress core as of release version 5.9. The Gutenberg plugin, available in the WordPress Plugins directory, is a plugin intended for testing of upcoming beta Gutenberg features on non-production environments. Adding the Gutenberg plugin to a site is unnecessary for Gutenberg to be available for content editing, and the plugin should not be added to a production environment due to the experimental nature of the releases.

Last updated: May 20, 2022