We’re happy to announce the release of The Plesk WordPress Toolkit 4.10, the last major release of the WordPress Toolkit 4.x line. Don’t worry, we’re not abandoning the project. This is simply our way of saying that the next big WordPress Toolkit version is going to start with number 5 – hooray!
Discover the Plesk WordPress Toolkit
WordPress Toolkit 4.10 is also the last major WordPress 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. WordPress Toolkit 5.0 will only be available for Plesk Obsidian.
With that said, let’s see what’s new in the Plesk WordPress 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.
WordPress 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 WordPress 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 WordPress 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 WordPress Toolkit. And this is the direction we’ll be focusing our improvements on in the next releases.
cPanel Support
Our efforts to make WordPress 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 WordPress 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 WordPress Toolkit work better with multisites.
Future Plans – What’s Next?
The team is already working hard on WordPress Toolkit 5.0, which will also be the first public WordPress Toolkit release for cPanel. This version increase also warrants changes in WordPress Toolkit UI to make sure it focuses on important things and stays responsive, flexible, and useful.
After the release of WordPress 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 WordPress Toolkit team for their hard work. And thank you for your attention. If you have a question related to the Plesk WordPress Toolkit, please let us know in the comment section below. Until next time!