The New iControlWP WordPress Management Control Panel v3.0

iControlWP is about to get the biggest overhaul of its life.

It’s not going to be a pretty UI refresh where we change a few colours and add some cool Javascript. We’re not even going to give it a cool new release “codename”.  In fact, on first glance you wont hardly even notice the difference.

But it’ll be different, very different.  Read on to find out what’s new.

A summary of the changes

From the day we released we’ve offered “utility pricing” on iControlWP.  This is where we don’t charge for arbitrary tiers like “Basic”, “Professional”, “Business”, which lock users into paying more for what they actually need.

We’ve talked about this before – this is great money for the service provider, but terrible for users.

We also don’t do feature gating. All users, regardless of their “status”, have access to everything. If something is a paid upgrade, they have access to it without having to upgrade their whole service package to “Business” and pay tonnes more money.

This wont be changing.

What will change however is multiple subscriptions to different products.  Currently, if you want WordPress management and WorpDrive backup, you have 2 subscriptions. This is now being converted to a single product subscription – i.e. iControlWP WordPress management.

Then, with the likes of WorpDrive backup, you simply put the add-on onto the sites you wish.

No more confusing subscriptions!  Just 1 subscription with multiple add-ons… as many as you need, on as many sites as you want them. It’s all up to you.

New Feature Add-Ons

This new simplified subscription system opens the door to new feature add-ons within the service.  With our original offering we couldn’t really offer these in the flexible “utility” manner we wanted to.

We want to allow you full flexibility in what you have on your account. Perhaps you don’t need WorpDrive backup on all your sites – that’s no problem, and you shouldn’t have to pay for it if you don’t need it.

The same goes for all other add-ons we are soon to release (they wont be live with the upgrade) :

• White Labeling
• Site uptime monitoring
• Client Reporting
• WordPress Security Control Panel
• WordPress development sites
• Task Scheduling

With every single add-on we release, you can add it to 1 site, or to 100. You only pay for each application of it and again we don’t lock you into paying for tiers.

New Payment Options

We use Stripe to handle our client payments – in this way we maximize security for our client data and our customers never need to leave the application to handle their billing.

But, some clients want to use alternatives such as PayPal etc., and with this new system release, we’ll be able to start offer alternatives to paying for subscriptions.

New User Interface and Better Wizards

This is probably the most noticeable difference you’ll see when you log into iControlWP after the upgrade.

We introduced Wizards into our WordPress Management Control Panel long before our competitors then started to tout this as a “Feature”.  We believe wizards and helpful walk throughs are useful to getting clients up and running quickly and we’ve developed some powerful in-house tools to improve our user experience.

You’ll find that iControlWP will offer more and more simplified wizards to achieve some powerful WordPress management results. The WorpDrive interface has been overhauled and simplified, with more improvements to come after release.

Adding new sites, managing plugins, optimizing the WordPress database have all had an overhaul, making it even easier to get your WordPress management done better and faster.

We’ve come a long way, and we know there is a long way to go, but we know you’re going to love the improvements.

Don’t worry though, our professional user interface is still the same and we’re not planning on adding any pretty cosmetics 😉

When and What Impact

We’re set to release this upgrade in and around the 11th / 12th February.

It will unfortunately require a bit of offline maintenance time which we estimate to be around 1 hour long.  Depending on how smooth the upgrade process goes, it could be less or more, but we’ll do our best to make the transition as smooth and seamless as possible.

Will prices change?

No, not for existing customers.

As we’ve outlined, everything, even WorpDrive, will be reduced to a single iControlWP subscription with associated add-ons.

If you’re on WorpDrive only, you’ll be converted, but the price you pay wont change at all. Everything will remain exactly as it was.

That said though, we will be revising our prices for both iControlWP and WorpDrive in the coming week.

Questions?

Please feel free to drop into the iControlWP support centre to ask questions if you have any regarding the upgrade. We’re happy to help with any concerns you may have.