After installing the necessary plugins to build our donations platform, let’s apply some global configurations to the network. These changes will allow us to use a global frontend dashboard on the network.

This way, users won’t have to use the normal wp-admin dashboard; only super-admin users will have access to the normal WordPress dashboard.

Our platform users will use a custom dashboard that we will create using WP Frontend Admin to manage their donations sites.

Essential sites for your Fundraising platform

Our fundraising platform requires 3 essential sites:

1. The network’s main site – This site will be used to sell the membership plans and promote your platform. It will contain a beautiful homepage, pricing pages, contact forms, blog posts, etc.
2. The global dashboard’s site – On this site, we’ll create the global frontend dashboard by displaying the admin pages from the GiveWP plugin on the frontend. When users manage their sites, they will use the frontend admin pages from this site instead of using the normal wp-admin panel.
3. Template site – Every user who registers a new account on our donations platform will get a site, and this template site will be cloned to their sites. This will save them a lot of time since they won’t have to create the sites from scratch

Let’s add a new site and set up some global configurations for our platform.

1- Add the frontend dashboard site to your network

Let’s create the Global frontend dashboard site using WP Ultimo.

• Go to Network Admin > WP Ultimo > Sites.
• Click on Add Site.

Enter the following information:

• Site Title: We’ll enter “Dashboard” as the site title.
• Site domain/path: Since our multisite network works with subdomains, let’s add something like “dashboard” so that our global dashboard site’s URL is something like “dashboard.myapp.com”.
• Site Type: Regular WP Site
• Click Add new Site.

2- Set up the global settings for the WP Frontend Admin plugin

Go to Network Admin > Frontend Admin and click on Open settings page:

a) General settings

On the General settings, select the following values:

• Enable global settings on Multisite: Yes. The settings you select here will apply to all the sites of the network. 
• Disable the wp-admin notices when viewing on the frontend: Yes. Users won’t see admin notices on the frontend dashboard.

• WordPress Multisite: Use this site as the dashboard for the entire network: Select the site we created above as the global dashboard site (step 1 of this lesson).
• Click Save to apply the general settings.

b) Access restrictions

Move to the Access Restrictions tab and select these values:

• Enable the wp-admin access restrictions: Tick this checkbox.
• Access restriction: What wp-admin pages can be viewed on the frontend: We don’t need to do anything here at this moment. However, when the platform is finished, we will need to make sure all the wp-admin URLs that have been displayed on the frontend dashboard are here. More on that in future lessons.

• Access restriction: Who can access the wp-admin dashboard: Select manage_network because only super admins (network admins) should be able to access wp-admin. Other users will have to use the global frontend dashboard.
• Access restriction: Frontend dashboard URL: Enter the URL of the frontend dashboard site.

• These user roles will use the frontend dashboard: Enter the following in this field:

administrator

• Finally, click on Save.

In the next lesson, we’ll learn how to create a WP Ultimo membership plan.