Four ways the updated WordPress Toolkit helps your business

Apr11
by Ike on April 11, 2018 at 1:50 pm
Posted In: Plesk, Product and technology, Releases, WordPress Toolkit, wordpress toolkit update

Calling all WordPress devs, agencies and web admins – How smoothly do you manage your WordPress sites and apps? You, like millions of other WordPress users, know the feeling of workload stress. And with the need to save time and get more done, Plesk created an all-in-one solution. We packed our latest WordPress Toolkit update with simplified ways to build, secure and run your WordPress.

More about Plesk     Try Plesk for Free

We last updated the WordPress Toolkit on April 25, 2018. Skip to the update here.

Presenting the WordPress Toolkit

Make your life as a WordPress user easier, whether you’re a beginner or pro. Simplify a variety of dev workflows, automate tasks and manage instances- using a single dashboard. Plesk has created the most complete, secure and versatile toolkit for WordPress. Let’s run through the benefits.

1) Your daily workload becomes simple

You can initialize and configure WordPress from start to finish, with one button. And one dashboard to mass-manage multiple WordPress instances. Quickly clone, sync, update, migrate and execute complex tasks. You can even manage multiple plugins and themes at once!

2) You never have to develop on a live site again

We all want a safe testing space to eliminate high-risk activities, right? That’s another WordPress Toolkit plus. Got a new brilliant idea to implement – plugins, features, themes or code? Test it in a sandbox before pushing to production. Then click to sync when you’ve smoothened the kinks and squashed the bugs. With one-click staging, the days of coding live are behind you.

3) You protect yourself against online attacks

Plesk made sure that the WordPress Toolkit fortifies your site by default. It comes with a security scanner that implements the latest security practices and extensions, including best recommendations from WP Codex and Security Experts. This goes beyond the basic hardening you normally find with other panels.

So there’s no security expertise necessary because the toolkit does all the heavy-lifting for you. When you scan all your WordPress sites with Plesk, you can identify and protect your core installations. All you need to do from your end is check the items you wish to harden, click “Secure”, and you’re done.

4) You enjoy smooth site-running and automation

It’s really simple, but not amateur. You get full control with:

  • WP-CLI
  • maintenance mode
  • debug management
  • search engine index management
  • and much more.

To update WordPress, plugins or themes, all you need to do is activate Maintenance Mode and follow the buttons. If something goes wrong or you deploy something breaks stuff, Restore Points and Backups let you restore your site back to its former glory. You can also manage all important debug options in WordPress or on a per-instance basis, from one interface.

Choose to enable or disable the option for search engines to index your site on a case-by-case basis. And if you need to, you can get easy access to WP-CLI for any WordPress instances. We’re talking – importing a database, creating a new user, updating themes and plugins – all in a flash.

 

The Latest WordPress Toolkit Updates


Updated April 25, 2018

The Toolkit’s 3.1.0 update includes long-awaited plugin and theme autoupdates, completely redesigned. Plus, improved Smart Update comparison screen, and a bunch of smaller changes and bugfixes. 

See our full changelog.

Updated April 11, 2018

We fixed a number of small issues related to the new UI and made some improvements. Every little counts!

Updated April 5, 2018

This one addresses two small but important issues you reported. First, we improved the reliability of creating instance preview screenshots. WordPress instances now learned to politely stand in the queue instead of overcrowding the screenshotting service like barbarians. Secondly, activating a theme on a WordPress instance no longer shows themes being switched off on other instances in the list when these instances also have Themes tab opened.

Updated March 6, 2018
We’ve published a major WordPress Toolkit milestone – the 3.0 version. This update includes way more than just a couple of bugfixes. Hold on to your seats because we’re delivering several killer features that could shake things up in the WP hosting services landscape.

The biggest change has got to be the completely redesigned, modern, responsive UI & UX for WordPress instance management. The idea is for the instance list and overview screen to merge into one single ReactJS-based UI, providing much a better user experience. We hope you guys share our love for the new interface!

The next big feature is Smart Updates. Using Deep Learning algorithms and screenshot analysis, Smart Update checks the WordPress update in a test environment before performing it on the production instance. Glory to our AI masters! Any update within WordPress Toolkit, be it WordPress core, plugins or themes, can now use the Smart Update service on a per-instance basis. And you can see both automatic and manual updates supported. With a treat of comparing “before” and “after” screenshots.

Finally, all WordPress Toolkit users can now enable nginx-based caching on their instance with just a single click. The default caching settings are good enough to satisfy most users, but if you really want to fine-tune the caching options, go to the “Apache & nginx Settings” page on Websites & Domains – it’s all there.
Note: all these features are only available on the all-new and improved Plesk Onyx 17.8 – just released this month! So don’t miss out and get upgrading.

Updated Dec 26, 2017

Got the updated WordPress Toolkit yet? Since the launch, we took our users’ feedback and made the Toolkit better and even more useful.

One main feature of our fresh release is the ability to upload and use your own custom plugins and themes. Handy for Managed WordPress hosters. You just upload to the server-level plugin and theme repositories so other server users can see and install them too.

Even more, there’s the ability to install plugin/theme sets during custom installation. Server admins can also add their plugins and themes to sets for further provisioning. And you can even hide the option to access your sets from your users.

The new WordPress Toolkit release includes a variety of bug fixes too so now your experience with cloning, PHP and much more will significantly improve.

One Tool to Rule Them All

Love the sound of the WordPress Toolkit? Try us out for free by clicking below. And if you’re ready to remove complexity, run and grow your business starting today, then contact us. We’ll help you find a good fit.

   Try Plesk for Free    Contact our Team  

Our Plesk University WordPress Toolkit course will even back you up with any info you need to use the Toolkit. Plus, you get certified with a shiny, new badge upon completion. We’re ready when you are!

The post Four ways the updated WordPress Toolkit helps your business appeared first on Plesk.

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Problem with Recent EasyApache Update

Apr04
by Ike on April 4, 2018 at 5:21 pm
Posted In: Apache, CMS, Community, cPanel, Events, Products, Releases, security, System

Last night, we pushed an update to EasyApache4 wherein after the update was installed Apache service may fail to restart properly. Upon checking the Apache error log, you may see error messaging similar to the following: Server xxxxxxx.com Primary IP Address xxxxxxxxxx Service Name httpd Service Status failed Notification The service “httpd” appears to be down. Service Check Method The system failed to connect to this service’s TCP/IP port. Reason Service check failed to complete …

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Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in March 2018

Apr04
by Ike on April 4, 2018 at 7:00 am
Posted In: Hosting, Performance
Rank Performance Graph OS Outage
hh:mm:ss		 Failed
Req%		 DNS Connect First
byte		 Total
1 Rackspace Linux 0:00:00 0.000 0.690 0.022 0.051 0.051
2 XILO Communications Ltd. Linux 0:00:00 0.000 0.318 0.071 0.142 0.143
3 Webair Linux 0:00:00 0.000 0.355 0.081 0.161 0.161
4 Hyve Managed Hosting Linux 0:00:00 0.000 0.194 0.082 0.664 0.665
5 CWCS Linux 0:00:00 0.000 0.332 0.116 0.220 0.220
6 New York Internet FreeBSD 0:00:00 0.004 0.579 0.060 0.125 0.125
7 EveryCity SmartOS 0:00:00 0.004 0.240 0.071 0.317 0.317
8 vXtream Ltd Linux 0:00:00 0.004 0.243 0.076 0.153 0.153
9 Memset Linux 0:00:00 0.004 0.246 0.083 0.165 0.165
10 Swishmail FreeBSD 0:00:00 0.004 0.253 0.085 0.171 0.173

See full table

Rackspace had the most reliable hosting company website in March 2018, with no failed requests and an average connection time of 22ms—the quickest amongst the top ten. Rackspace provides a diverse range of managed cloud hosting solutions to customers around the globe, with data centres and offices in the US, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Four other hosting company sites also successfully responded to all requests this month, with the tie broken by average connection time. XILO Communications takes second place with a 71ms average connection time. XILO Communications has maintained 99.99% uptime over 5 years, and has appeared in the top ten in each of the first three months of 2018.

Third and fourth place positions were extremely close, with a difference of just 1ms in the sites’ average connection times separating them. Webair came in third place, with an 81ms average connection time. Webair provides managed cloud services from its data centres in New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, and Amsterdam.

Hyve Managed Hosting‘s site takes fourth place with an average connection time of 82ms. Hyve continues its top ten streak, now having had its site in the top ten for 14 consecutive months. Hyve operates its services from 18 different data centres worldwide and has maintained 100% uptime since Netcraft began monitoring it in June 2016. CWCS takes fifth place with a connection time of 116ms, also with no failed requests.

Linux is the most popular operating system among the top ten this month, accounting for seven of the top ten sites. FreeBSD makes a couple of appearances, with SmartOS making a single appearance.

Netcraft measures and makes available the response times of around thirty leading hosting providers’ sites. The performance measurements are made at fifteen minute intervals from separate points around the internet, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24 hour period.

From a customer’s point of view, the percentage of failed requests is more pertinent than outages on hosting companies’ own sites, as this gives a pointer to reliability of routing, and this is why we choose to rank our table by fewest failed requests, rather than shortest periods of outage. In the event the number of failed requests are equal then sites are ranked by average connection times.

Information on the measurement process and current measurements is available.

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WordPress 4.9.5 Security and Maintenance Release

Apr03
by Ike on April 3, 2018 at 7:56 pm
Posted In: 4.9, Backups, CMS, PHP, Releases, security, Wordpress

WordPress 4.9.5 is now available. This is a security and maintenance release for all versions since WordPress 3.7. We strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.

WordPress versions 4.9.4 and earlier are affected by three security issues. As part of the core team's ongoing commitment to security hardening, the following fixes have been implemented in 4.9.5:

  1. Don't treat localhost as same host by default.
  2. Use safe redirects when redirecting the login page if SSL is forced.
  3. Make sure the version string is correctly escaped for use in generator tags.

Thank you to the reporters of these issues for practicing coordinated security disclosure: xknown of the WordPress Security Team, Nitin Venkatesh (nitstorm), and Garth Mortensen of the WordPress Security Team.

Twenty-five other bugs were fixed in WordPress 4.9.5. Particularly of note were:

  • The previous styles on caption shortcodes have been restored.
  • Cropping on touch screen devices is now supported.
  • A variety of strings such as error messages have been updated for better clarity.
  • The position of an attachment placeholder during uploads has been fixed.
  • Custom nonce functionality in the REST API JavaScript client has been made consistent throughout the code base.
  • Improved compatibility with PHP 7.2.

This post has more information about all of the issues fixed in 4.9.5 if you'd like to learn more.

Download WordPress 4.9.5 or venture over to Dashboard → Updates and click "Update Now." Sites that support automatic background updates are already beginning to update automatically.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to WordPress 4.9.5:

1265578519, Aaron Jorbin, Adam Silverstein, Alain Schlesser, alexgso, Andrea Fercia, andrei0x309, antipole, Anwer AR, Birgir Erlendsson (birgire), Blair jersyer, Brooke., Chetan Prajapati, codegrau, conner_bw, David A. Kennedy, designsimply, Dion Hulse, Dominik Schilling (ocean90), ElectricFeet, ericmeyer, FPCSJames, Garrett Hyder, Gary Pendergast, Gennady Kovshenin, Henry Wright, Jb Audras, Jeffrey Paul, Jip Moors, Joe McGill, Joen Asmussen, John Blackbourn, johnpgreen, Junaid Ahmed, kristastevens, Konstantin Obenland, Laken Hafner, Lance Willett, leemon, Mel Choyce, Mike Schroder, mrmadhat, nandorsky, Nidhi Jain, Pascal Birchler, qcmiao, Rachel Baker, Rachel Peter, RavanH, Samuel Wood (Otto), Sebastien SERRE, Sergey Biryukov, Shital Marakana, Stephen Edgar, Tammie Lister, Thomas Vitale, Will Kwon, and Yahil Madakiya.

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How and Why to Build an EDGE Server

Apr03
by Ike on April 3, 2018 at 4:00 pm
Posted In: Apache, CMS, Community, cPanel, edge-tier, Events, how to test cpanel, Products, Releases, security, System, testing cPanel server, Tips & Tricks, update cpanel

* This post was originally posted on September 27, 2016, and has been updated for accuracy.  The Tiered Release System The tiered release system was introduced early in the development of cPanel & WHM. We knew it would be important to appeal to all types of users, from the risk-taking early adopters to the stability-seeking delayers. Each tier represents a different risk vs reward ratio, and today we’re here to talk …

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