WordPress on VIP

WordPress environments on the WordPress VIP Platform can be created as either a WordPress single site or a WordPress multisite. WordPress multisite (also known as a WordPress network) allows multiple sites to be created and run from a single installation of WordPress Core files. A copy of VIP Must Use plugins (VIP MU plugins) is loaded on every environment to provide performance enhancements and commonly used plugins like Jetpack and Akismet.

There is no SFTP access for managing files with the /wp-content directory of a WordPress site on the WordPress VIP Platform. The methods required to edit the contents of that directory on the WordPress VIP Platform are designed to enhance the performance and security of a WordPress site.

• /wp-content/plugins and /wp-content/themes: Files and directories for plugins and themes can only be added, updated, and removed via code commits to an application’s GitHub repository. Plugins and themes cannot be added or removed within the WordPress Admin dashboard.
• /wp-content/uploads: Media files that are uploaded to the WordPress Media Library are located within /wp-content/uploads file path. However, instead of mapping to a filesystem located within the web container, the contents of /wp-content/uploads are located in a read-only object store separate from the web container called the VIP File System. 

The version of WordPress running on an environment can be managed by customers in the VIP Dashboard or with VIP-CLI.

WordPress environments 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. 

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.