Hope you had a great holiday last week. v2.6 was in beta for the past 2 months. Thanks a lot to all beta users who tested it out and made it better with their feedback. We released it to public a few days ago. It should now be available for you to update. Check out what new in v2.6.
Multi-call backup improvement
As we mentioned in a post a few months ago, the improved multi call backup module is now ready. It is more reliable now. We have optimized memory usage and fixed some table crashing issues for certain sites.
Backups will now work well even in shared environments with just 30 to 60 secs of timeout and a few MBs of memory. We also fixed a bug which was leaving temp files without deleting.
We still have a beta tag on it. We are studying it’s stability on various servers and once it becomes more stable, we will be removing the beta tag and make it our default backup method.
New Amazon S3 libraries
Few of our users were facing random failures while backing up to Amazon S3. We found that Amazon’s new library is more reliable than the one we used. Initially Amazon did not provide an officially library for PHP. Since the new SDK requires PHP v5.3.3+ in the WP server, old SDK will be used in WP sites whose PHP version is less than 5.3.3
We also added support for Frankfurt bucket for Amazon S3. This requires PHP v5.3.3+
Update the Cloud Backup addon to v1.1.0 for this to take effect.
Auto retrying failed tasks
Reloading data from the WP sites can fail due to factors including timeout of the admin panel, WP site being busy and returning a 500 error etc. To improve this, we will now automatically retry failed tasks once all reload data tasks are done.
This will greatly reduce random failures during reloading site data and loading, installing and updating plugins/themes.
Multiple open admins
With the “Open admin here” option you could open any site’s WP admin dashboard inside the IWP admin panel. But you could open only one dashboard at a time. With this new update, you can open multiple wp-admins and easily switch between them. Do you find yourself opening a site’s dashboard often? You will love this update. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
Favicon fetching
We got a lot of feedback to stop using Google for fetching the favicon for the site list on the left. This was a privacy concern since it can leave footprints of using IWP in Google’s servers (not in Google Search).
It also occasionally caused the WP sites’ server to crash temporarily because of the call made by Google to fetch the favicon. So we came up with our own favicon fetching system which will fetch the icon and save it locally and serve it. To further reduce the load on the server, only the favicons of the sites that are within the viewport will be loaded first and then the rest as they are scrolled into view. We will be updating favicon weekly once when the panel is idle. So the initial load of the panel will be faster now.
This change is part of a set of changes we are doing to provide a truly private 100% self hosted app. One of the other upcoming changes is using a local file to serve the fonts via @font-face instead of using Google Fonts.
Google Webmaster
Google recently rebranded Webmaster as Google Search Console. It also changed its API implementation that resulted in breaking the Webmaster addon. We have updated to the new Google Search Console API. For this change to take effect, you have to update the Google Webmasters addon to v1.1.0 and reauthenticate with your Google account as described here.
IWP Client plugin now runs on PHP7
When PHP7 was released, we thought it will take time for our users and hosting providers to support PHP7. But due to the popularity of PHP 7 and it being twice as fast as PHP 5.6 the adoption rate was high. We started getting some backup related issues and had to fix them soon.
The client plugin v1.5.0 is now compatible with PHP7 and we will be releasing a PHP7 compatible Admin Panel in v2.6.1 which is expected in the mid of Jan.
