WordPress specific customisations on Presslabs

Change is the only constant—any WordPress site owner knows it, duh! To keep up with WordPress updates, we’re continuously developing adjustments to help our clients make the most of their smart managed hosting experience.

WordPress is an extremely flexible Content Management System and we love it for that. We’ve made some adjustments on how it works on our platform and you can see below the changes that you’ll notice when your site runs on Presslabs.

Where are the wp-config.php and php.ini files?

You can’t see your wp-config.php or php.ini files for security reasons. Most of the wp-config.php configurations are available directly from the Managed Hosting Dashboard, but you can also create your own wp-config and php.ini files in your git repository, to override the default ones. They need to be placed inside a config folder situated in the root of your repository, like so:

Create your custom wp-config.php and php.ini files

After modifying these files, a site restart is required, so you’ll need to write us an email to support@presslabs.com to perform it.

Custom NGINX files

You can create you own custom NGINX files inside your git repository, under config/nginx/conf.d/*.conf.

For example, to protect custom URLs with basic auth, you can create a file under config/nginx/vhost-post.d/00-feed-access.conf with the content:

location ~ ^/feed/msn {
    auth_basic "Restricted Content";
    auth_basic_user_file /app/config/msn.htpasswd;

    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$is_args$args;
}

Where config/msn.htpasswd is the file that stores your required password.

wp-admin is always served secured

In short the wp-admin area of your site is always delivered secured from your main domain using Let’s Encrypt certificates, no matter if the public site has or not HTTPS enabled. You can find more information about why we’re doing this on our security page.

Tweaks for plugins and themes

Considering that there are some plugins and themes that are not working out of the box on our platform, we’ve applied several fixes to make them properly work with us. In case you bump over a plugin or theme that doesn’t properly work, please let us know and we’ll have a look.

Posts missing schedules

This is an issue happening quite often, scheduled posts not actually being published at their scheduled time. As a result we have applied a fix platform-wise, where we’re looking for missed posts every 5 minutes and publish them.