WP Juggler

WP Juggler is your ultimate solution for effectively managing an unlimited portfolio of WordPress sites from a single, intuitive dashboard.

WP Juggler helps you to enhance your operational efficiency, ensure your sites stay current with updates, and reclaim precious time to focus on more impactful projects.

Being an open-source and completely free tool, WP Juggler is designed to revolutionize your WordPress maintenance experience without costing you a dime.

The idea behind it

WP Juggler is a product of BoldThemes' need to efficiently manage more than 100 demo sites showcasing our premium WordPress themes and more than 200 websites resulting from our agency work.

Before the creation of WP Juggler, managing multiple sites was a chaotic, time-consuming process that often resulted in costly maintenance issues. The solutions available in the market were either inadquate, overpriced or fell short in efficient functionality.

So we have created WP Juggler

Why choose WP Juggler?

There are more than few reasons to consider WP Juggler over existing commercial products. With WP Juggler you can:

• Track WP Health and WP Debug info for all your WordPress sites
• Seamlessly login into wp-admin panel of your sites with a single click
• Set up uptime monitor and receive alerts when your sites stop responding
• Manage your WordPress plugins - update, activate and deactivate them in bulk from a central point
• Host your own plugins in your network and update them as if they were hosted on wordpress.org
• For additional security, verify checksums of installed plugins, themes and WP Core and receive alerts on all failed checks
• Track known vulnerabilities of current versions of your plugins and themes and avoid being hacked
• Manage and update themes from a central point
• Track WordPress wp-admin dashboard notices for all your WordPress sites
• Set granular user rights to control who sees what within your network

WP Juggler is fully compatible with WordPress multisite setups.

It also makes TGMPA plugins fully integreted into WordPress update mechanism.

This is important if you have premium themes (such as ones coming from ThemeForest) installed on your sites. Their packaged plugins will be treated the same way as all other plugins in your WordPress installations.

How does it work - Main concepts

WP Juggler has two components:

• WP Juggler Server plugin - This repository
• WP Juggler Client plugin

Note

WP Juggler Server is a self-hosted WordPress plugin which features control panel for centralized WordPress management of your sites.

This means that the data governance within your network is entirely under your control.

Network setup - as easy as one, two, three

You can setup your WP Juggler Network in three simple steps:

1. Kickstart the process by installing the WP Juggler Server Plugin on one of your WordPress sites
2. Install WP Juggler Client plugins on sites you want to control and manage
3. Register and activate your sites on your server with a single mouse click

Complete User Documentation

You can find the complete User Documentation on this link: https://documentation.bold-themes.com/wp-juggler/ but you can also find the Getting Started intructions below.

Getting Started Guide

Install plugins

1. Download wp-juggler-server.zip file from the latest release of WP Juggler Server plugin.
2. Install and Activate WP Juggler Server plugin on one of your WordPress sites. This site will serve as your control panel.
3. Download wp-juggler-client.zip file from the latest release of WP Juggler Client plugin.
4. Install and Activate WP Juggler Client plugin on WordPress sites you want to monitor and manage remotely.

Add new site

1. Navigate to WP Juggler > Sites in your server's wp-admin and click Add New
2. Enter the site name as title, enter the site url.
3. Click Assign Users and add the users who will be able to manage the added site (add your user for start).
4. Click Save and copy API Key to clipboard

Activate new site

1. Navigate to WP Juggler screen in your client site's wp-admin and enter bith API Key and server's url
2. Click Save Settings. You will should see the message that your site is successfully activated
3. If the activation fails and the Auth Header Test Row also says "Failed", do as instructed in the section Enable PHP HTTP Authorization Header

Fetch your first data

1. Navigate to WP Juggler > Control Panel in your server's wp-admin and your newly activated site should appear in the list.
2. Click the arrow at the end of its row to expand the panel and click Refresh All Site Data
3. Once the refresh finishes you will be able to see the summary of the data retrieved from your site.
4. Explore the available info by clicking buttons in the expansion panel

Enable one-click login to wp-admin

1. Navigate to WP Juggler > Sites in your server's wp-admin and edit the desired site.
2. Check Automatic Login, enter Remote Login Username (username of the user you are going to log in on the target site) and click Save
3. On your client site, edit the User's profile and check Enable auto login for this user.
4. We are all set. You can test the login by first logging out of the client site's wp-admin.
5. Lastly, go to your control panel and click wp-admin button in your site's row. You should be automatically logged in as chosen user.

Setup your crons

WP Juggler uses WP Cron system to automatically refresh remote site data.

You can set the refresh frequency by navigating to WP Juggler > Settings in your server's wp-admin.

Important

The WordPress cron system is activated automatically based on a page view / init action. This means that if you do not have visits on your server site, the WP Cron will not fire and no data will be automatically retreived. This includes uptime crons.

Solution for crons

Therefore it is best to set up a cronjob to call the wp-cron.php file in the root of your server WordPress install every 5 minutes, otherwise your scheduled tasks may not run correctly.

Depending on your hosting environment, there is more than one way to do this.

Here is the general explanation from WordPress plugin handbook on how to this: Hooking WP-Cron Into the System Task Scheduler

On most hostings you can do this on your hosting control panel or hosting dashboard. Here is the explanation from SiteGround.

Contact your hosting support if needed.

Enable PHP HTTP Authorization Header

Note

This section describes the actions that need to be taken if the Auth Header Test says Failed either on Server or Client side

Shared Hosts

Most shared hosts have disabled the HTTP Authorization Header by default.

To enable this option you'll need to edit your .htaccess file by adding the following:

RewriteCond %{HTTP:Authorization} ^(.*)
RewriteRule ^(.*) - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%1]

just after

RewriteEngine on

WPEngine

To enable this option you'll need to edit your .htaccess file by adding the following (see #1):

SetEnvIf Authorization "(.*)" HTTP_AUTHORIZATION=$1

ToDo List

If you have a feature proposal or an idea on how to make WP Juggler better and more useful, please use Issues section. We will be glad to review them and add them to the list.

Currenty opened development tasks:

• Alert emails when front end or API is down
• Remote plugin installation
• Retrieve and set Site Option values
• Vulnerability check of installed themes and WP Core
• Checksum verification of themes from WordPress.org