With iControlWP v2.0 right around the corner, the next couple of blog posts are going to outline just some of the features and enhancements that are on the way.
You should know, iControlWP doesn’t offer restrictive pricing tiers like standard, professional, business. When you’re subscribed to the standard package you get all of these new WordPress management features. No extra subscription to higher tiers is required.
Without further ado, let’s just dig right into them.
Login As Anyone
iControlWP works different to the many other WordPress Management tools out there that all share the same great code written by Prelovac for his huge ManageWP service. iControlWP is completely original, and written from scratch, to serve a different set of needs.When you add a site to iControlWP, you add it based on its URL. That’s it. You don’t need a username and you certainly don’t need a password.
This had 1 knock-on effect. It meant that our “login as” feature was a guess, and effectively meant you logged in as an administrator to the site, but it appeared to be random just who you would login as.
It wasn’t actually random, but users didn’t have any say in the matter. It served its purposes for the most part, but didn’t offer the kind of flexibility we’d like.
We’ve changed that with v2.0. Now you can login to your WordPress site as anybody. Simply pick the user you want to login as, and go!
You can even set the default, so that wherever you use the login as feature, it uses this user every time. See below:
Login As Any User (Part 1)
Login As Any User (Part 2)
Directly Manage WordPress Comments
A feature that really has been long awaited is the ability to management WordPress comments directly from with the iControlWP control panel.
With iControlWP v2.0 WordPress comments management has arrived.
iControlWP will dynamically poll your site for comments based on your criteria, and pull them back to the control panel for you to manage.You can mark a comment as approved, unapproved, SPAM, or move it to trash.
You can poll for all comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks, and you can poll them based on their state of approval. It’s up to you!
Take a look at the screen shot below for an example of the interface:
Feature: Manage WordPress Comments
- Select comments of a given state
- Select comments of a given type
- Choose the number of most recent comments to poll for
- Set the default each time this page loads
- Instantly change the state of the comment – approved, unapproved, spam, or trash.
Malware Security Scan from Sucuri
To be honest with you, we’ve held off implementing Sucuri scanning from within iControlWP for several reasons.
It’s not because it’s hard – in fact, it took us a total of 3 hours to implement start-to-finish.
Reason:
- it’s a 3rd party tool that doesn’t in itself do anything, except scan your site and check for your site on blacklists. It doesn’t fix anything, and instead can leave you feeling a little dis-empowered.
- just because everyone else does it, doesn’t mean we should too.
The 2nd point here comes down to how we define ourselves in our market. We’re not just throwing “functionality” at our service to check off boxes so we can list to you features we have.
We want more than that for you, and for us.
We want to fill iControlWP with powerful features that help you get the most out of your WordPress admin – we want it to be a tool that helps you get everything done you need to do, as fast as you can do it.
Honestly, we don’t see Sucuri malware scanning as a feature – you can scan your sites for free directly from Sucuri itself.
But, we’ve included it as a means to give you a quick shortcut to do it, as some people have asked for it.
To see typical results for a bad site with the iControlWP Sucuri Site Scanner, see the screen shot below.
Sucuri Malware Scan Results
If this happens to you, the question now becomes… “Well what are you going to do about that?”
We’ll have the perfect answer to this, and more, as iControlWP develops. So stay tuned.
iControlWP v2.0 will be released on or before 1st April 2013. It’s nearly here so get signed up now and get ready to be impressed!
