Add your MainWP Dashboard as a Child Site

HowTo
1

Can I add MainWP Dashboard site as a Child Site?

This is a question that we see in MainWP Support almost every day and the answer is Yes!

There are multiple reasons why you should do this, however, I will focus on one in this article.

First, let me guide you through the process of connecting a dashboard to itself.

  1. Go to your Dashboard site
  2. Go to the WP > Plugins > Add New page
  3. Search for MainWP Child Plugin
  4. Install it and Activate it just as any other WordPress plugin
  5. Next, go to the MainWP > Sites > Add New site page
  6. Fill in the form with the Dashboard Name, URL and Administrator Username (in some cases, other fields will be needed too).
  7. Click the Add Site button to complete the process.

From this point, your Dashboard site will be listed as any other Child site in the MainWP > Sites > Manage list.

Let’s get back to the reason we are doing this. As a support agent at MainWP, I often see that users are not keeping the MainWP Dashboard plugin and MainWP Extensions up to date. This can cause a variety of issues the two biggest ones being Security and Compatibility.

So, with this tutorial, I want to show you how to enable Auto Update so you don’t have to worry about updating your MainWP Dashboard and MainWP Extension.

  1. Go to the MainWP > Settings page
  2. Locate the Update Settings section and in it, set the Plugin automatic updates option to Install Trusted Updates.
  3. Save Settings
  4. Go to the MainWP > Plugins > Auto Updates page
  5. In the Search Plugins options set filters to All Plugins and add “mainwp” in the keyword field
  6. Click the Show Plugins button
  7. Once the search results are displayed, select all MainWP Plugins (Extensions)
  8. Use the bulk actions menu to mark all of the as Trusted

That is it, MainWP will update itself and you don’t have to worry about it anymore.

1 Like
2

I came here looking for this exact answer. My question now is, would you consider a feature to have the dashboard site treated as a child site automatically? It seems this might be a nice idea for new users who don’t necessarily think about the need to keep their main dashboard up to date (and secured with security plugins). My thought here is that your child sites are only as secure as your weakest link, and if the dashboard is neglected this can be a serious issue.
For example, I have extensive security plugins installed on my child sites, but I just set up a fresh MainWP dashboard and hooked it up to these child sites, but I haven’t yet installed all the security plugins on my dashboard site. Therefore, my child sites are now unprotected if a hacker knows my dashboard site URL and is able to get in due to the lack of security plugins in the current state.

3

Hi @wesyah234, thanks for your suggestion. To be honest, this is not something that we have on our road-map at this moment. However, I do agree with you that keeping the Dashboard site updated is very important. That is the reason we added the red warning button/icon to the header element when there are available updates. As described here.

Also, if you want, you can always move this suggestion to the Features section where other users would be ablet o comment and vote up this idea.

4

Thank you, I added this as a feature request.

1 Like