VIP Frequently Asked Questions

WordPress VIP manages and maintains a stack that includes Debian GNU/Linux, PHP, MySQL, NGINX, Memcached, Kubernetes, Docker, Node.js, Redis, and Elasticsearch. These technologies work together to provide a robust and scalable platform.

WordPress VIP operates on a multi-tenant architecture but doesn’t offer dedicated hosting. This architecture allows for efficient resource allocation and scalability across multiple customers.

No. WordPress VIP is a fully hosted solution running on its private cloud infrastructure, which lives in the same data centers and is managed by the same team that runs WordPress.com and Tumblr. This ensures optimal performance, security, and support from the WordPress VIP team.

The WordPress VIP team manages and patches WordPress Core, the platform’s Must Use (MU) plugins, and the underlying system components. Regular updates and patches are applied according to the release schedule and SLAs, ensuring a secure and stable environment for customers.

WordPress VIP logs activity at various layers, including the application, web server, load balancer, database, and operating system. This comprehensive logging allows for real-time analysis and investigation of security issues.

WordPress VIP performs hourly backups for production databases and daily backups for non-production databases. Backups are stored for 30 days. Customers can use backup shipping to automate sending backups to an AWS S3 bucket of their own.

No. WordPress VIP supports WordPress apps, which are written in PHP, and Node.js applications, which are written in JavaScript.

WordPress VIP supports two types of Node.js applications: decoupled/headless frontends and microservices/APIs. This flexibility allows for building powerful and scalable applications using JavaScript.

The deployment process on WordPress VIP involves a version-controlled GitHub development workflow. Each application has its own GitHub repository, and deployment typically takes just a few minutes. This provides a controlled and efficient deployment process.

Every application on WordPress VIP comes with a production environment and one non-production environment. Additional non-production environments can be requested, allowing for separate development, staging, and testing environments.

Yes, you can run penetration tests on your applications hosted on WordPress VIP. However, prior notification and approval from the WordPress VIP team is required. This makes sure proper guidelines and procedures are followed to maintain the security and stability of the platform.

Yes, with enough time and expertise, WordPress can power a wide range of applications. Whether you’re building a blog, an ecommerce site, portfolio, or community forum, WordPress provides a flexible and customizable platform to meet your specific needs. However, it’s important to carefully evaluate your project requirements, making sure WordPress aligns with your goals and objectives.

Jetpack and Akismet are automatically installed and enabled for all WordPress sites. Parse.ly is a content analytics platform that gives creators, marketers, and developers the tools to understand content performance and prove content value. The Parse.ly Content Helper is available to all VIP customers. The Content Helper is integrated with the WordPress Admin post editor and provides content creators with real-time insights on the post or page they are currently editing. The Parse.ly Content Helper highlights:

• Past performance for published posts
• Related Top Posts in the WordPress editor
• Parse.ly analytics data when viewing posts in a list view
• Parse.ly analytics data in a WordPress dashboard widget

There are three primary ways that companies integrate VIP Content Analytics. Each involve the same basic steps:

• Adding the Parse.ly tracker to all pages on your site that you want to track.
• Including metadata in one of our recognized formats on all site pages you want to track.

Based on your CMS, we use one of three integration approaches to get our solution up and running. The differences come down to how many people need to be involved, and who those people need to be.

1. WordPress plugin integration—requires minimal coding and developer involvement; in most cases, none at all. A user with WordPress admin access can handle everything. 
2. Basic integration—requires at least one dedicated developer. 
3. Tag integration—requires hybrid involvement from a developer and an end-user, e.g., a marketer, editor, or content manager. 

The data in the analytics dashboard comes from the Parse.ly Tracker—a small piece of tracking code added to your site (during the first integration step). The tracker is a line of JavaScript that monitors user actions and relays them to our analytics servers. 

The easiest way to install the Parse.ly Tracker is with the WordPress Parse.ly Plugin. This plugin installs the tracking code throughout your site and automatically collects metadata (the second integration step).

Metadata enables deep content analysis. In the analytics dashboard, it allows you to use filters, generate reports, and customize the overview screen. 

You can set up metadata to flow into the dashboard via JSON-LD, repeated meta tags, or a combination. 

• JSON-LD—following open standards and schemas, you can also use this script tag for other services (such as Google, for enhanced display in search listings).
• Repeated meta tags—if your CMS can provide page information as meta tags in the page header, then this might be a better option.

And if you’re using the WordPress Parse.ly Plugin, just enter your Site ID. We’ll automatically pull your metadata straight from WordPress.

We’ll detect and update it for you.

Alongside the in-app feature that lets you check for metadata updates yourself, VIP Content Analytics offers a backend system for customers that detects metadata changes automatically on your website. If we find data that’s changed, we update the metadata on that page to reflect the changes in your analytics dashboard.

The Data Pipeline is a fast and easy way to build in-house analytics atop flexible, clean, accessible, and real-time user interaction data. With it, turn any website or mobile app into a data stream of rich user interaction data—and in minutes, not months.

When users interact with your business online, they generate user interaction data. VIP Content Analytics measures and collects all this data, and you can access and work with it however you want via the Data Pipeline. The Data Pipeline also has a robust infrastructure for instrumenting your own user interactions, otherwise known as custom events.

The data formats developed for the Data Pipeline are especially easy for Python, R, Spark, Redshift, and BigQuery to work with. We also have standard integration schemas and recipes so that the data can be used in ad-hoc querying and dashboarding tools, such as Looker, Periscope, and Tableau.

The Content API leverages natural language processing, AI, and all the unique metadata collected to make highly sophisticated and customizable content recommendations that enrich readers’ on-site experience.

It also provides complete access to the real-time data collected through the analytics dashboard, which includes traffic and social data on articles, authors, sections, referral sources, and topics discussed in the content.

Brands and publishers use the Content API to populate personalized content recommendation widgets, newsletters, homepages, infinite scroll features, and more. For WordPress users, a pre-built WordPress block lets you quickly add those personalized content recommendations to any post.

The Content API features multiple endpoints that can be called to retrieve data from the system.

• Analytics
  Returns a list of posts, authors, sections, tags, or channels depending on query parameters.
• Conversions (beta)
  Addresses two use cases: First, to download detailed URL-level conversion metrics for ad-hoc analysis. Second, to provide a top-converting content module on your site containing a list of URLs, filtered by metadata, and ranked by conversion metrics.
• Exclude
  Manages a list of URLs that should be excluded from the results of all other API endpoints.
• Metadata
  Updates the metadata for a post or video (depending on the specified metadata type) using the received metadata dictionary.
• Partners
  Provides a means for partners to programmatically create and list Site IDs (apikeys) for their customers.
• Recommendations
  The endpoints on this page are designed to be used in-browser (called via JavaScript), so no API secret is necessary.
• Referrers
  Returns a list of the top referrers for a referrer type.
• Search
  Searches for posts by keyword or query. These can match against full content.
• Shares
  Retrieves a listing of top posts by social shares across top social networks.
• Top 10 or Top 25
  Returns today’s top posts or videos. This endpoint was designed to be a lightweight and fast way to access top content lists without exposing your API secret or actual metric values.

VIP Content Analytics offers different ways to segment your audience in the dashboard, so you can focus on a subset of users while also maintaining a view for your entire audience. Set up segments based on geography, user status (e.g., subscriber, anonymous user), campaigns, and more. 

Regardless which option you choose, setting up Audience Segments in VIP Content Analytics starts with understanding your target audience segments and mapping them to your business objectives. 

Geographical audience segments can be set up immediately, without development work simply by specifying the desired geographic areas to be tracked. To set up other types of audience segments, follow the custom setup process laid out in our documentation. These are the basic steps:

1. Select your segments of interest
2. Email them to Support with basic information
3. We update your dashboard(s) per your specification
4. Your developers do final setup and testing