Plesk & SocialBee have teamed up. Save 30% now!

All You Need to Know About the Plesk WP Toolkit 4.10 Release

We’re happy to announce the release of The Plesk WP Toolkit 4.10, the last major release of the WP Toolkit 4.x line. Don’t worry, we’re not abandoning the project. This is simply our way of saying that the next big WP Toolkit version is going to start with number 5 – hooray!

Discover the Plesk WP Toolkit

WP Toolkit 4.10 is also the last major WP Toolkit release that supports Plesk Onyx 17.8. Although we’ll continue to release security updates for Plesk Onyx customers until its End of Life. However, if you want to keep getting major new features and improvements, it’s time to update your Plesk. WP Toolkit 5.0 will only be available for Plesk Obsidian.

With that said, let’s see what’s new in the Plesk WP Toolkit 4.10.

Site Backup

Users have been asking us for a long time to introduce a simple tool for quickly backing up a single WordPress site. Plesk has a great Backup Manager tool that works wonders in the majority of cases, but it might be overkill sometimes. 

Specifically, the issue some customers have with Backup Manager is that it backs up the whole subscription with all its sites and data instead of a single site. This can be particularly annoying if you have several sites on a subscription – for example, one staging site and one production site. 

Backing up such a subscription requires much more time and disk space than needed if you want to back up just your production site, for example.

WP Toolkit 4.10 introduces a tool for backing up and restoring individual WordPress sites to address this issue. 

This link has been previously directing users to Plesk Backup Manager for the corresponding subscription. Now it opens a new window for backing up a particular site:

Backing up a site is as simple as clicking Back Up, no configuration or setup is required. A separate directory in the user’s webspace stores all site backups. When you use Plesk Backup Manager to perform a scheduled backup or to back up your stuff to cloud storage, these site backups made by WP Toolkit will be usually included.

In addition to backing up your site, you can download backup files to safely store them elsewhere or upload them on a different server. Restoring a backup could actually be quite destructive for a website since its data will be rewritten. So a corresponding warning is shown. Hesitant users are given the option to back up their site before doing a restoration, as a helpful suggestion.

Backup is a very complex and involved topic. So we had to make some compromises to efficiently use our resources. Clicking download icons will take you to File Manager, while in the future it’ll start the download process immediately. We’ll also relax some restrictions on supported backup file names and metadata to make sure that a wider range of WordPress backups is supported for restoration purposes. And the restoration process itself is more user friendly.

Right now, the feature is focused on backing up and restoring data in the context of an existing website hosted in the same place. Working with WP Toolkit-made backup files uploaded to a different server is a difficult process now. And we’re looking into improving that in the nearby future.

There aren’t immediate plans to introduce features like cloud backup or scheduled backup – users can employ Plesk Backup Manager for that. The goal of this feature is a quick and effective creation of WordPress site backups for further processing outside of WP Toolkit. And this is the direction we’ll be focusing our improvements on in the next releases.

cPanel Support

Our efforts to make WP Toolkit work on cPanel are coming to a happy end soon, as the project is going through its final lap already. We still need to fix some issues and add a couple of things, but we’ve already hosted several demos for large hosters, getting very positive feedback.

The product will first launch with the novel pay-as-you-go licensing – available exclusively to a number of hand-picked partners. After a short period of time, it’ll become available to the general public, with a more traditional licensing scheme based on license tiers. Stay tuned for a special announcement to learn more about this landmark event.

Bug Fixes and Multisite Support

Our colleagues in cPanel helped us uncover a couple of potential security issues, which we have promptly addressed. We have also fixed several annoying customer bugs. As far as research goes, we needed to figure out the existing limitations of multisite support in the WP Toolkit, so we could improve it in the future releases. Extensive research into multisite support was conducted, and a lot of new information was unearthed. 

Now, we have a clear understanding of what we should fix to make WP Toolkit work better with multisites.

Future Plans – What’s Next?

The team is already working hard on WP Toolkit 5.0, which will also be the first public WP Toolkit release for cPanel. This version increase also warrants changes in WP Toolkit UI to make sure it focuses on important things and stays responsive, flexible, and useful. 

After the release of WP Toolkit for cPanel the team will have more free hands to work on feature requests and various improvements. So we expect a lot of interesting things to be released until the end of the year. Keep your feedback coming, and we’ll keep the releases going! 🙂

Once again, many thanks to the whole WP Toolkit team for their hard work. And thank you for your attention. If you have a question related to the Plesk WP Toolkit, please let us know in the comment section below. Until next time!

No comment yet, add your voice below!

Add a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

GET LATEST NEWS AND TIPS

  • Yes, please, I agree to receiving my personal Plesk Newsletter! WebPros International GmbH and other WebPros group companies may store and process the data I provide for the purpose of delivering the newsletter according to the WebPros Privacy Policy. In order to tailor its offerings to me, Plesk may further use additional information like usage and behavior data (Profiling). I can unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time by sending an email to [email protected] or use the unsubscribe link in any of the newsletters.

  • Hidden
  • Hidden
  • Hidden
  • Hidden
  • Hidden
  • Hidden

Related Posts

Knowledge Base

Plesk uses LiveChat system (3rd party).

By proceeding below, I hereby agree to use LiveChat as an external third party technology. This may involve a transfer of my personal data (e.g. IP Address) to third parties in- or outside of Europe. For more information, please see our Privacy Policy.