It’s been a couple of weeks since we detailed what’s happening with the iControlWP WordPress Management system, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy! 😉
We’ve:
- made large system changes to improve the performance and reliability of our WorpDrive WordPress backup service,
- we now provisionally support updating 3rd party plugins and themes
- added ability to create new WordPress users
Here is a run-down of some of the biggest changes in more detail.
Beta: Updating Premium and non-WordPress.org plugins and themes
The ability to upgrade non-WordPress plugins and themes is a tricky one and we’ve done quite a bit of work recently to broaden our support for this.
This feature is in beta, and we need your feedback – when you find a theme or plugin that doesn’t update using iControlWP, we need you to tell us about it.
We have also taken steps to support 3rd party services such as Theme Forest using their parent Envato API. By plugging into this, you can update their your Themes directly from within the iControlWP WordPress control panel.
Pretty neat.
Improved WorpDrive Backup Reliability and Support
Our WorpDrive clients choose us over other backup solutions because we work – our backups work, and our team works hard for your backups.
Pretty simple, huh?
Several of our clients have reported they lost whole client sites because their previous provider would report backups running, but in the end, they were failing for months.
With WorpDrive – when your web hosting is up and running, backup just works. If you have problems, or you change something that prevents WorpDrive from working, we inform you immediately.
We can’t fix your web hosting, but we can tell you when your backups don’t work.
The challenge with website and hosting management is knowing when there are problems, not trying to discover them or being completely unaware that there are any!
Most of this week was spent further hardening up the WorpDrive backup stability and website testing to report issues as soon as they appear.
Create New WordPress Users
We’ve now added the ability to create a new WordPress user on any site.
But what makes our approach different?
It’s our attention to detail – some of our clients have commented that they prefer our approach to WordPress Management because, while it may not offer the same extensive range of features (yet), those features that we do have are done with care and attention to detail.
When the screen loads to let you add a new WordPress user, we first ask your WordPress site what User Roles are available. It’s a simple touch, but one that’s overlooked in nearly all other WordPress managers.
Consider also our Login-As feature – with any other service you can only login as the admin. With iControlWP, you can login as any user you like. You’re the Administrator after all and sometimes you just want to check things are the way should be, without fiddling around with user passwords etc.
What’s coming to iControlWP soon?
iControlWP is basically a unique combination of 2 different products – high quality WordPress backup, and centralized WordPress management.Communicating these two platforms to you, our client, while at the same time combining them and separating them within our system is proving a little tricky. We’re going to simplify the licensing system a little.
At the same time, we’re going to add to our licensing system the ability to add our extra Premium add-ons on a per-site basis.
One of your greatest advantages with iControlWP is the flexibilty to pick and choose as many add-ons for each of your sites as you want. You don’t have lock-in with expensive tiers for all your sites.
Once we make these new licensing and billing changes, this will pave the way for all our new premium addons, such as:
- site uptime monitoring
- white labelling
- daily update emails
- fully-automated plugin and theme updates
- client reporting tools
- sub-user accounts
- statistics
- and more…
Do you need a fresh approach to WordPress management?
If you haven’t tried iControlWP to manage your WordPress sites, now is the perfect time to do it.
We have a 30 day unlimited, no-commitment trial so you can get your feet wet and test the system in full.
It’s free to sign-up using the form below and will take just a few seconds.
