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. 

• 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. For security reasons, logins for the wpcomvip user are disabled.
• 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.
• By default, the 100 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 combines core WordPress, platform-specific VIP MU plugins, and custom application code added to the application’s wpcomvip GitHub repository.

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.

Media files

Media files that are uploaded to a WordPress 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 an object store that is separate from an application’s web containers.

Media files that are uploaded to a WordPress production environment are automatically available to its associated non-production environments. This eliminates the need to copy media between environments. After a data sync from a production environment to a non-production environment is completed, the target environment will automatically load shared media files that were uploaded to production. Media files are read-only when accessed from non-production environments, protecting them from being altered unintentionally.

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 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.