InfiniteWP 2.8.0beta1 is out people, and, boy oh boy, this one is smokin hot! We have one revamped addon in addition to two brand new addons and a host of fixes that our clients have requested over the years. Personally, I’m very excited, I hope you are too!

Let me start off with the new revamped client reporting addon that’s been on the wishlist of quite a many users.

Looks like most of you just heaved a sigh of relief 😛

Client Reporting beta: Let me be honest with the facts here, the old client reporting was pretty much plain jane and boring. You know it, we know it too, hence the revamp. The revamped version is quite interesting with a lot of attention to detail. The best part about the new revamp is the architectural change. You may be wondering what has changed, so for all you curious folks, read on!

Update activity was retrieved from the IWP activity log in the previous versions. If you made any updates to the site via the WP Admin, those changes would not reflect in the client report. That has changed now and the activity log is directly retrieved from the WP Admin. Any activity you make on the site – be it via the IWP Panel or the WP Admin, you can put it down in black and white for your clients to see. That’s cool, isn’t it? For now, we have the data for updates and backups in the beta release, more data to be added as the beta addon matures. You can check out the design in person, no spoilers here 😀

Now, most of you would stop reading this post, content with the fact that the Client reporting has been re-released but wait, there’s more for you.

Staging Addon: The Staging addon is one of the most popular feature requests on our ideas forum and we figured it’s high time we add it to our growing list of addons. With this addon in place, updating your WordPress site becomes less taxing and hassle-free. All you need to do is, update the new plugin or theme on the staging site and if everything looks like you desired, you apply the same to your live site. As simple as that. No more rollback, no more reverting changes and no more asking your host to help you restore your site to a previous version. No bells and whistles here!

Next in line is an unnamed addon which I prefer to call the WP Vulns addon for now.

Codename WPVulns: Let me throw some light on what it does. Say there’s a security update for a plugin or theme on WordPress, the WP Vulns addon tells you that there is a vulnerability on the previous version and it’s recommended to update the plugin or theme to the newer version. This applies to WordPress core updates too. It tells you what has changed and also provides you with a link to the WP Vulnerabilities Database where you can check out the details of the vulnerability and why the update was released. As for a name, we are hoping to find a suitable name before the stable release 😉 Your suggestions are most welcome!

Note: This is applicable only to releases where vulnerabilities have been identified and security updates have been released.

Please also note that these addons can be installed only after you update the panel to v2.8.0beta1 which is being released in waves. Give it some time for your panel to receive the update.

We are done with the Addons, let’s see what’s more in store for you.

JS and CSS Loading Optimized: This one is a bonus from the development team. Whenever you open the InfiniteWP Admin panel, the initial loading and displaying of data used to take quite a while and our developers felt that this should be optimized. Infact, in line with our goal of saving infinite time. So what was happening earlier is that the IWP Panel used to load the JS and CSS files for all the addons and each addon had like a handful of files. Now all of these files and content on the files has been consolidated onto a single file which has infact reduced the overall file count by 70%. So the number of calls to retrieve the data from the JS and CSS files has also reduced thus making the IWP panel load 50% faster than before.

And last but not the least, this is the part where we have made some minor tweaks to the way backups are performed and the way they are shown on the UI.

Backup Bug Squashed: Failed backups are shown in the IWP Panel’s UI because the backup db maintains a record of all backups including the failed ones. What’s changed with this release is that the record of the failed backup on the db will be cleared once the next backup is triggered. Earlier only the failed backup files would be deleted, now the records in the db are deleted as well. Going forward, you wouldn’t be seeing the date ‘Jan 01, 1970’ in correspondence to a failed backup.

Schedule Backups Optimized: The other change is that no two scheduled backups for the same site will run simultaneously. Say you have scheduled a daily backup for a particular site at 7pm and a weekly backup of the same site on Friday at 7pm. In the previous versions both backups would run parallel thus utilizing heavy resources and increasing the chances of failure whereas with the new version only one backup will run at a time and once it is completed the next backup will be initiated.

The changes mentioned above are just the tip of the iceberg, icing on the cake, whatever you would like to call it. There’s a lot more that’s changed with the current beta release and you will very soon be experiencing all the changes on the stable update too. I know, I know, the stable users, you guys would be getting impatient but I assure you that this fruit will certainly be very sweet and worth all the wait.

Let us know in the comments what you think of the changes and what you would like for us to change, we would be really happy to do so 🙂 With this, I’m signing off my first blog for InfiniteWP and beginning our strategy of Customer Driven Product Approach where we will be working on really cool stuff that you guys have shared with us on our idea forums and via tickets over the years. Cheers!

P.S: If you’d prefer to try out these features in beta rightaway rather than waiting for the stable release, go to your IWP Admin Panel and click on the IWP Update Centre button on the top menu bar, you would see a check-box allowing you to participate in the beta program. Opt in and once a beta package is available for your IWP Panel, you will be notified and you can check out the new features as and when they are released.

P.P.S: I’d suggest you to backup your current IWP Panel in its stable version before updating to beta so that you can restore it back to original if anything konks on the beta release.