We just upgraded all components of the WPCloudDeploy plugin that underlies the FireupWP (now WPCD.Cloud) service. There are many new features so lets get to listing them – hope you end up being as excited about these as we are!
New: Options For Enabling Features After Servers Are Deployed.
There is a new SERVER tab in the SETTINGS screen that look like this:
It allows you to configure some items to automatically run after your server is deployed. If you’ve been manually configuring these items after every server deployment this will save you some time.
Simplified Staging Sites
WPCD.Cloud has some very sophisticated staging functionality. However, many folks coming from classic hosting expect a much more simplified experience. To address this demand we have introduced a separate STAGING tab on the sites screen.
This tab will have a single button on it depending on context.
If a site is not a staging site, the button will offer the option to either:
- Create a new staging site which uses our CLONE SITE functionality behind the scenes or
- Overwrite the existing staging site which uses our COPY TO EXISTING SITE function behind the scenes.
If a site is already tagged as a staging site, it will just offer the option to push back to live. As you might expect, this “push to live” feature just uses our existing COPY TO EXISTING SITE functionality.
We also added an optional “STAGING” column (shown in the above image). There we show the 1-to-1 relationship we establish behind the scenes between a live site and a simplified staging site.
Password Protect WP-LOGIN with HTTP Authentication
Tired of your wp-admin/wp-login getting hammered and slowing down your site? But you don’t want to or can’t use any of the other mitigations (hide login, Cloudflare proxy etc.)? Maybe this new option can help.
You can password protect just the wp-login page so that login attempts are now stopped at the web-server level before it gets to your site (and loads up all the wp-code). It is far more efficient to stop bad stuff at the web-server level.
We already had a throttle on the wp-login page but this removes any and all traffic to it unless the proper password is entered.
Note that this doesn’t help mitigate attacks on custom login pages such as the ones created by WooCommerce, Ticketing Systems, Form Builders and so-on.
Extensive Options For Enabling/Disabling Tabs For “Owners” of Servers and Sites
WPCD.Cloud has the concept of a ‘server owner’ or ‘site owner’. This is useful when using the WPCD WooCommerce modules to sell server subscriptions and site subscriptions. But even without those modules, an admin can assign “ownership” to a particular user.
Ownership of a site or server gives full admin access to that item.
But sometimes, that’s not desirable.
With this new feature, the system admin can decide what tabs are available and active for ‘site owners’ and ‘server owners’.
With the introduction of simplified staging sites with their own internal tag, we can separate out the rules. For example, you can prevent owners from accessing the CLONE tab for staging sites.
We have also taken this one step further with ROLES on a tab-by-tab basis:
Finally, all these new options are also possible at the TEAM level!
As you might expect, there is an interplay between all these items: TEAMS, AUTHORS, OWNERS, ROLES and WordPress Capabilities – and we have created documentation that should help clear up any confusion.
White Label Options
There are multiple enhancements in this area.
White Label Tab
We have started a new WHITE LABEL tab. Some of the items that have gone into the WP-CONFIG.PHP file in the past can now be configured here. It’s currently very basic but over time we’ll be moving many items from WP-CONFIG.PHP into this tab.
As you can see from the above image, we have also added some items that would normally require some custom CSS.
In addition we have included the ability to change where the documentation links point to on certain tabs – in the past this would have required a custom plugin or code-snippet that utilized our hooks/filters.
New Options to Show / Hide Certain Column Data
We’ve added new options to remove items from certain columns if the user is not an admin. Check out the images below:
Simplified Backup Tabs For Non-Admins
We now offer the option to remove certain items from the backup tab if the user isn’t an admin.
Filter For Sites That Need Updates
Every night we push data from all servers to the WPCD plugin about the state of sites including whether a site needs theme or plugin updates.
You can now filter the site list to show only those sites that need attention.
Change File Upload Size
There is now a new option to change the file upload size in the TWEAKS tab for a site:
If you’re an experienced WPCD.Cloud admin, you’re probably sitting there scratching your head while wondering “wasn’t that somewhere there before”?
The answer would be “yes, partially”.
The option to change the PHP settings to allow larger uploads has been around for a while in the PHP tab. But you would still have to manually update the NGINX configuration to allow it as well.
This option takes care of both configuration files in one shot. It sets three options actually:
- client_max_body_size
- post_max_size
- upload_max_filesize
The last two options in the list are actually PHP options but they still end up in the NGINX configuration file as pass-through values to the PHP process.
This is something we should have done a while ago but since most users were ok with our default 25MB upload size it wasn’t an urgent issue.
Still, the bash script has been burning a hole in our pockets for a few months now so we’re really happy to finally get this out there.
PHP 8.1 and Other Upgrades
New servers will get PHP 8.1 installed as part of the tech stack. Older servers can have it installed from the UPGRADES tab if needed.
We also have two additional optional upgrade buttons to upgrade WP CLI and the 7G Firewall.
If, in the future, any of these items become a mandatory upgrade we’ll force an upgrade but, for now, all three items are optional.
New: Resize DigitalOcean Servers
We now have a new server tab for resizing servers.
Resizing is only supported for DigitalOcean at this time. You will not see the resize option for other providers.
Note: If you’re offering server subscriptions to your customer or access to servers under your own account, you will want to disable access to this new tab!
New: Options To Hide Owner Names & Server Names
These new options are useful if you’re using WPCD.Cloud to offer site or server subscriptions to your end-users. In these use-cases it might sometimes not be appropriate to display the owner and server names in the site / server lists.
Cron Improvements
We have updated our script that replaces WP-CRON to be less taxing on server resources. Instead of running the linux cron for all sites at the same time, we now serialize it. This will result in less server resources being used within a given cron period.
To get the benefit of this change you will need to disable the LINUX cron for a site and re-enable it.
Log Limits
We now have options to set the log limits on each type of log.
New: Support For Disabling or Enabling DigitalOcean Backups
You can now choose to automatically enable or disable Digital Ocean backups when creating a new server. In prior WPCD versions, we always forced the backups to be turned on with every new server.
Now, you have to proactively enable this in the DigitalOcean provider settings screen:
New: Support For Native Server Tags In The DigitalOcean Provider
We’ve supported server tags in other providers – now we can add DigitalOcean to that list:
New: Additional Cron Intervals
We’ve added 2 min and 3 min intervals to the LINUX cron options available from inside WPCD.
Of course, you can always log into your server directly and change the interval as you see fit but this gives you a couple of additional options inside the convenience of the WPCD panel.
Under normal circumstances you should not need anything less than 60 min crons but there are a few use-cases where smaller intervals are needed.
New: Additional User Options For A Site
We moved the option to add an emergency ADMIN to a site to a new tab named USERS.
In there we also added options to add a new regular user and change an existing user credentials.
Under most circumstances these options should not be needed but we needed to add the functions to support new features in our WooCommerce add-ons. So we decided to expose them in the core plugin as well instead of just keeping them as hidden functions.
Tweaks
- We added some checks around post types when deleting log entries.
- When a LINUX cron is enabled, the interval field is now hidden. Prior to this change, admins might have thought that the interval could be changed without disabling and re-enabling the service. Hiding it makes it clearer that the service needs to be disabled before any changes can be made.
- The team permission screen has been updated to use an additional column:
- Change the default order of the array used to list UBUNTU versions so that 20.04 is first.
- When removing a site make sure we remove entries in the wp-backup.conf and wpcron.txt files.
- Updated list of WP versions.
- New servers now install wp-cli 2.6; optional upgrade function to allow upgrades to wp-cli 2.6.
- Disable PHPMyAdmin if certain components of the 6G and 7G firewall are enabled.
- Remove some extraneous text in the 6G and 7G firewall tabs.