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Allow Site Admins to Install Custom Plugins

Hi – I have created a multisite install, and understand that it has a limitation that sites can only activate/deactivate plugins that have been installed centrally.

However I noticed that the WordPress.com Business Plan allows sites to add custom plugins. Is there a plugin (or other way) for me to allow my site admins to be able to install custom plugins under a multisite install?

If not, is there a way to manage a central set of plugins for single site installs so that I can centrally define configuration for some some white labeled plugins that gets applied to every site, but still allow the ability for the local admin to add plugins?

Mon, 22 Jan 2018 6:53:02
  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hello King,

    I hope you’re well today and thank you for your question!

    I don’t have an insight to the WordPress.com infrastructure so I need to do a bit of “guessing”. What is known that their business plan is actually a “managed wordpress hosting” (though with limited access in that sense that you e.g. don’t have FTP access, etc). I’d say that this is probably actually not a multisite setup but rather a “virtualized” configuration: when you sign up for a site there’s actually a virtual instance of an entire “pre configured” (and of course fully connected to their environment) single install created. That’s entirely possible and would explain quite logically how that can work that way.

    On a multisite there’s no way to let sub-site admins install plugins. Due to the way WordPress works, all the plugins are actually stored in the same single location (/wp-content/plugins) folder, sharing files and resources. There are also some other difficulties. You could keep a big repository of plugins installed on a network and use some additional tool to manage them (so e.g. users would have access to different set of plugins depending on a chose package, our Pro Sites plugin would be a nice choice here). However, that’s it.

    The other option would be to give those admins a super-admin privileges – either by simply assigning them a “super-admin” user role or by granting some additional capabilities. Still, that would make them super-admins which is obviously a tremendous security risk.

    Best regards,

    Adam

  • King
    • New Recruit

    Hi Adam,

    Thank you for your help! The reply clarifies what I needed to know.

    I think multisite is the wrong solution for me. It would be more appropriate to manage my sites individually and use a management plugin to work across all the sites.

    King-

  • Sajjad Rahat
    • Staff

    Hi Marco ,

    I hope you’re doing well.

    The WordPress multisite environment doesn’t allow subsite admins to install plugins on the site, and there are currently no options available in WPMU DEV plugins to give the subsite admins the privilege to install plugins on a multisite environment.

    Best Regards,
    Sajjad Rahat