There’s nothing wrong with the need for speed in coding. However, if you lack coding standards, your products will become fragile and liable to break down in the future. Move fast and you’ll break things over and over. Let’s talk about why coding standards matter.

Life without coding standards

Facebook made the phrase “move fast and break things” famous. If you’re in startup mode, speed matters. After all, you’re painting a blank slate. If you never grow in your coding standards, how will that affect your product and team?

Think of your main product and how it evolved. Each month, you ship new features. Each quarter, you comb through bug reports. And then look for ideas to improve. Each developer on the team has their style. For instance, one developer may religiously use comments to describe what they’re doing. Another developer may use the “write drunk, edit sober” philosophy and focus on achieving quality through debugging. As a manager or team lead, it’s tough to stay organized and productive.

Widely differing code standards also hurt your team’s effectiveness and morale in subtle ways. Think about hiring new people to the team. How long will it take new hires to learn how your team codes? Without a clear commitment to a coding standard, the onboarding process will take longer. Furthermore, when people use different coding standards, debugging and testing become more difficult.

One way to solve the problem of slow product development and team tensions? Adopt a single coding standard for the team.

Introducing coding standards

What coding standards should you adopt for your company? Ask 10 developers, and you’ll get 11 answers. Rather than prescribe a solution for your company, we suggest reviewing the following options first. But a word of caution: It’s easy to go overboard with coding standards. A small number of rules or principles will go a long way.

The principles approach to coding standards

Rather than discussing specific technologies and providing samples, the principles approach goes a different way. For instance, think about the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. You can see that as a principles approach when it suggests: “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.”

The main problem of this approach? Developing robust first principles takes some serious thinking! It’s not going to be an overnight process. The benefit is that your company will have broad ideas that can be applied to a variety of circumstances.

Issues to consider when creating coding standards:

• Emphasize decision making values. Principles help guide how a developer approaches code. For example, the agile emphasis on close collaboration with the business helps you plan your daily coding work.
• Prioritize the long term. A principles-based coding standard should be able to stand for two or three years without any changes.

The procedures approach: Coding standards with all the details

In other situations, it makes sense to push for detailed procedures. If your company has armies of developers and you are struggling to stay consistent, procedures may be a better approach.

• Choose one focus language. Your company may use JavaScript, C#, and PHP. Covering all of these in your coding standards may not be practical.  For example, take a look at the Coding Standards for JavaScript.
• Balance theory and practice. For procedures to be beneficial, state a broad principle (for example, write comments in clear English with minimal slang) and provide examples of good code.
• Set a length limit. A 200-page coding standard document, even if valuable, won’t encourage developers to open the document.

Final coding standards tips

If you use the procedures approach to coding standards, appoint someone to own and maintain the standards. Otherwise, you may end up with an out of date document that provides little value.

Now based on those options, make some choices about what makes sense for your company. Balance your personal preferences with what your customers value. For instance, national defense customers will place a high value on security and internal control. If that’s what your customers want, then start building those points into your product.

The innovative ideas, the spirit of the community – building bridges for a better world wide web tomorrow. WordCamp Europe 2018 Belgrade rolled around for us to refuel on the WordPress energy. And WCEU 2018 was a special one with a record-breaking 2,085 attendees and 808 livestreamers. We got inspired by thought-provoking talks, shared and met peers, all wrapped up in an amazing 3-day experience. But here are the best takeaways for me and Plesk.

Why we love contributing to the WordPress open source project

Contributor day all went down the day before WCEU took off. With 177 returning contributors and 156 newbies to the group – impressive. It was so easy to get involved that I’m not surprised at the high number of returning contributors.

And it wasn’t just me either. We also had five Pleskians on the hosting team focusing on improving security. It feels great to be contributing as a team.

But one of the best bits has to be learning how much we all improved and fixed in our different teams in just one day. Be it in CLI, TIDE, Java, Marketing. And loads of pull requests too. Good job everyone!

Learning Content Security Policies (CSPs)

Content security policies (CSPs) are a relatively new security element online. CSPs use browsers to find and mitigate attacks such as cross-site scripting (XSS), clickjacking and more code injection attacks. These come from executing malicious content in the trusted web page context.You can use CSPs to enforce HTTPS on SSl-enabled sites and only authorize truly trusted sources, blocking others. The reality is most sites don’t have CSPs in place. So let’s band together and discover more. Below is what Miriam Schwab had to say about the whole new way of securing your sites that not many know about.

How to protect ourselves and our visitors from attacks

How are web apps compromised? It can be server-side – which is what we’re mostly used to,  and the client-side, so basically – on the browser. Among the top web app threats is cross-site scripting (XSS) – when a hacker injects evil js code into your source code, that loads onto the browser.

When XSS happens, the user is the victim, more than your app. As a result, the user can experience session hijacking, cookie theft, account takeover, redirecting traffic, credentials, unwanted ads, and infections. It’s not pretty, guys. So we need to take action.

First off, use directives, which are strings specifying the type of resource, taken from a predefined list (font-srcmframe-src, for example). And source expressions – patterns describing one or more servers that resources can be downloaded from (‘non’, ‘self’, ‘unsafe-inline, and so on).

It’s not great practice to put inline JS for behavioural practices. If your site has been built with inline scripts, it’s a vulnerability. But you can have these as security – it whitelists these inline scripts.

Content-security-policy (CSP): default-src ‘self’ https : ;

Script-src ‘self’ https://www.google.analytics.com

Basically whitelisting Google Analytics and saying that this is OK to load. Unsafe inline and unsafe eval is kind of vulnerable, but it’s another way of securing. Check it:

Content-security-policy: Script-src ‘unsafe-inline’ ‘unsafe-eval’

Content-security-policy: upgrade-insecure-requests;

All our WordPress sites are migrated on HTTPS and SSL – but something may have gotten lost. So this helps you ensure that everything is loaded with HTTPS. Therefore, you’ll always have a green padlock and no mixed content.

Tools to make you CSP journey a bit easier

Google created its own tool CSP evaluator – it does give you feedback which is useful. Otherwise it tells you ‘no CSP’. Security headers by Sophos give you a kind of report. And there are also some WP plugins for security. Report URI is an amazing site that spits out a security policy for you. And Telerik fiddler has a Windows version – you just put your URL in and it tells you what you need to put as a CSP.

XSS is one of the most difficult attacks to prevent but CSP helps add an extra layer of security. I know I’ve taken a lot away from this session – hope this was useful for at least a few of you. Because stats reveal that, even though WordPress powers almost a third of the web, the number of sites with CSPs in place is still relatively low. So let’s all make the internet a safer place with CSPs.

Inspired by WCEU? So are we

You can relive the whirlwind of talks, networking, inspiration, knowledge exchange, and generally all-round brilliant WCEU experiences on WordPress TV soon! Let’s now share this one goal to make WordPress, and the web, the best it can be.

A solo developer can keep their files on their machine, but that does not work for software teams. After all, you have multiple versions to use: test versions, old production versions and more. How do you keep it all straight? You use Git Hosting. Or better yet, Plesk for Git Hosting.

Using a git repository is powerful, but it is not a silver bullet for your company. If you have other needs like project management, then arranging Git Hosting may not be your top priority. Let’s break down some of the problems you might have and how using Git Hosting can help.

What issues are withholding your development?

Every development team has problems. It could be that you are struggling to scale up. Alternatively, maybe you are fighting to maintain integrations with dozens of partners. Consulting oriented organizations may be concerned with client management issues. Git Hosting will help with some of these problems, but not all.

Identify your top problems

Coming up with a list of your development problems is easy. Use the following methods to come up with a list in less than an hour:

• Tickets. What are the themes you see in tickets escalated to development?
• Feature requests. What themes stand out in these requests?
• Management comments and goals. Some management goals – like launching a new smartphone app – will have implications for the development team.
• Team meeting themes. Think back to the last 3-5 team meetings you’ve had. What problems keep coming up again and again?

Once you have your list in hand, rank the problems regarding which are most urgent and valuable to solve.

What problems can Git Hosting solve?

In our experience, using Git helps solve a few common development problems:

• Roll back your code. It’s easy for vandals to mess around with Wikipedia pages. However, they don’t make much of an impact because you can “roll back” in a single click – the same benefit just by using Git Hosting.
• You can work offline. You don’t need a constant server connection to get work done. Hopefully, Internet service isn’t a big problem, but offline support is helpful nonetheless.
• Support for experimentation. If somebody on your team has an idea for a killer feature, what do you do? Time permitting, let them develop the idea on their own branch, separate from the main code. You can get the benefit of supporting innovation without threatening your core product.
• Support distributed development. The days of having all of your developers sitting side by side are gone. If you want to work seamlessly with a distributed team, you need distributed tools to support them. Git makes it easy for each developer to get their work done. Then you can decide how and when to release new changes.

If your organization is struggling with other problems like readjusting after an acquisition, Git Hosting may not be your number one priority.

Decide on whether to pursue Git now or later

If your team is working on a rapidly changing product and has geographically distributed developers, you need Git. The question becomes how you should implement it?

Choose your Git option: remote or local

Let’s break down two ways git support works for web developers: a local repository and remote Git Hosting. Both have their place in development. The trick is knowing when to use which.

When to use a local repository?

As a developer, you have big ideas and the development tools to bring them to life. If you like, you can be like a mad scientist like Doc Brown in “Back To The Future” coming up with world-changing inventions:

There’s just one problem with coming up with new ideas. You don’t want to get criticized for pushing out half-baked ideas. That is where a local repository comes in.

It’s your private lab for coming up with new ideas. Maybe you’ll code your realistic version of the time-traveling car. With a local repository, you can keep your ideas private until you decide to share them.

When to use a remote repository?

Unlike local repositories, remote repositories are great for collaboration with your team. We recommend using repositories for your main production work.

If you have a lot of feature requests to manage and a remote team of developers, we recommend using a remote repository. It’s just the way that modern development works.

Tip: Remote work does not just mean working with experts around the world. If you have to collaborate with other divisions of your company, supporting remote work is a smart decision.

Now let’s look at how using Plesk for Git Hosting makes it easier to keep your repositories organized.

How Plesk for Git Hosting speeds up web development

The creative work of shipping a new website takes a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. When you are a few hours away from launch day, you just want to hit a button and call it a day. That’s where the Plesk Git extension comes in.

If you already have BitBucket or GitHub implemented, you can keep using them – our extension is built to support those tools. For managers, support for multiple branches means you can separate out production code from other code. That means no more embarrassing mistakes of publishing “lorem ipsum” code to the world. Yup, enter Plesk for Git Hosting.

Do you want to shave time off your web changes without sacrificing quality?

Or find out more about Gitman – When Plesk meets Git.

Technology has made doing business easier. Opening new streams of communication between businesses and users. But customer preferences are changing with time – they want faster query resolution. So with this, customer-centric businesses, like REVE Chat users, started moving away from traditional phone and email support to providing real-time assistance via a Live Chat solution.

Because of features like voice call, video chat, and co-browsing, making your website feel ‘alive’, customers adapted to live chat. So much so that 44% of online consumers prefer a live person answering questions during an online purchase. And say it’s one of the most important features a website can offer.

Yet there are a lot of businesses that don’t know how a Live Chat solution can help increase sales and provide better customer support. Let’s now discuss just how this happens.

eCommerce business has been growing at a great pace from past few years. In 2017, retail e-commerce sales amounted to $2.3 Trillion worldwide. As the preference of the people is shifting towards eCommerce, many players have entered into the market and are trying to get the share.

This has increased a lot of competition; hence companies are trying new ways to close the commerce sales. They are trying to communicate with the customers in real-time to make the interaction better.

• While a website visitor is on the product detail page, a live chat agent can initiate the chat asking if the user is having any doubt. This helps in converting the visitor into a customer.
• In a B2B business website; when a user’s browsing through your features page, your agent can initiate the chat and convert the visitor into a customer.
• When a website visitor is browsing through the support page of your website, a live chat agent, using REVE Chat for example, can help solve their query.

Hospitality industry has benefited greatly from technology advancement. It made it some much easier for travelers and tourists. The hotel industry continues a run of strong performance and is projected to sustain strong 5–6% growth throughout 2018.

By providing real-time interaction on their site, a hotel provides a seamless customer experience. For example:

• While booking a hotel room, customer can be assisted by a live chat agent by solving all his queries in real-time.
• If a person needs to cancel the booking, it can be done using live chat or voice chat without making him go into any extra hassle.

Think of all the business where someone may need a personal consultation. Online counseling, associates, and medical consultations are a few. These businesses have always been there offering a personal touch – but now they’re online. And it’s in these types of businesses that communication between two people has to be real-time as much as possible.

Examples where a live chat solution like REVE Chat comes into play in these kinds of companies

• You can have online counseling using voice/video chat, where it’s easier to make the person understand what you mean, rather than via chat.
• While understanding the case of the customer, it may become important for a doctor to examine the issue. You can achieved this with a video chat.
• When explaining something technical to a customer, like law and legal issues, chat and email may be insufficient. Voice chat would make it smoother.

While all other businesses have come online, banking has created its own space. Making the financial transactions easy for customers, a bank has helped a lot of customers by coming online. Banks are also selling few services like insurance, mutual funds online, but customers always tend to ask questions in things they don’t understand.

• A live chat agent can help a customer in deciding that which policy would be better.
• A video chat agent can make a customer understand about various aspects like NPV, debt fund, growth fund etc. while showing him the actual figures.
• A voice chat agent can help a customer in making a claim of a policy from website thereby giving him better customer experience.

This domain has adapted technology long back and has been using it to increase employee engagement. But they have also started using technology in recruitment processes. How?

• If a person wants to give interview, they’d need to log in to the company website using a username and password. Once in, they can conduct the interview using video call on-site. It also automatically becomes more inclusive to candidates who live abroad and so will also save the organization money.
• While giving an interview, if a candidate wants to show his coding skills he can do so with co-browsing. This shares the screen and takes control of the laptop.

Today, real-time communication on websites via chat support software is becoming necessary for all businesses. And with ever-changing customer preferences, a business will have to move from phone and email support to live chat exclusively.

Apart from the industries mentioned above, having a live chat solution is also helping a lot of industries to generate leads from their website. Live chat solution providers have gone a step further by integrating their live chat solution with CRM. This integration allows agents to transfer leads into their CRM with specific details, and hence giving a background to sales.

One excellent solution is REVE Chat

Have a look at what REVE Chat has to offer and see how you can benefit your business. The Plesk integration is seamless and you may never look back.

We usually consider domain reputation in the context of mailing services – a reputation score. Like when a mail transfer agent assesses how safe it is to accept emails from a server or domain. Then check them for spam or malware. But in fact, the term domain reputation is much broader. Generally, it’s a stamp of confidence in the website’s security.

 A good reputation means the website’s safe, while a “blacklisted” status by antiviruses warns visitors about possible security threats. There’s a vast amount of antivirus services that manage websites’ blacklisting databases. Those noticed in viruses’ distribution, phishing, hidden redirects or “drive-by” attacks.

The most authoritative sources to verify site reputation

• Google Safe Browsing
• VirusTotal
• PhishTank

Let’s take a closer look.

1. Google Safe Browsing (GSB)

Google maintains a service based on a database of suspicious and dangerous domains, using a special malware-scanning bot. The Malware Scanner checks websites for security issues or visitor attacks. Ones such as phishing / social engineering pages, hidden search and mobile redirects, malware downloads, and so on. Once detected, it blacklists and penalizes the domain, before storing it in a GSB database.

Now, a blacklisted domain doesn’t necessarily mean the website is malicious. Because, for example, one day compromised and infected legitimate e-commerce resources could start threatening visitors and get blacklisted in antivirus services. Including Google Safe Browsing.

By the way, if a website is under Google Console, it will notify a webmaster about the security issues and penalties. So, we strongly recommend you add your websites under Google Console as soon as possible.

OK, so then what comes after a domain gets blacklisted? The GSB is the source for domain reputation verification in Google Chrome, Safari, Mozilla Firefox, android mobile browsers and more online resources. Which means all those browsers and services start blocking access to the website. Or warn visitors as soon as it gets blacklisted. And that’s sad, right?

2. VirusTotal

VirusTotal clusters over 60 antivirus services together, including ESET, Trustwave, Kaspersky, Comodo, CleanMX, and Phishlab. These services export their malicious domain databases to Virustotal as feeds. Once the domain gets blacklisted by an antivirus, everyone learns about the threat via the aggregator.

Therefore, it’s probably good practice to use Virustotal to verify domains on a regular basis. Because it helps identify security issues at the earliest stage. And not only that – it takes the appropriate measures.

3. Phishtank

This service is an aggregator of the resources caught in social engineering and scam. It basically exposes a database as a feed. So, any online service can check their domain against phishing. And if the results are positive, they’ll either restrict access to it, or notify the user about the danger.

What happens when your website gets blacklisted?

The main problem is that visitors get an access-restriction to a website. And consequently, there will be a sharp decline in web traffic. In some cases, it may result in search engine penalties and loss of the leading SERP position.
Find out more about the SEO Toolkit that can help you fix your SEO issues.

Effects of Blacklisting

1. A website experiences security issues and a search engine flags it as “malicious” on a search engine result page. So, the users see the website may threaten them, and hence, will obviously not click the link.Sad truth: Flagged websites usually lose about 80-90% of their visitors.
2. Users on popular browsers (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari) usually experience another type of access issue. These browsers rely on Google Safe Browsing API in order to check domain reputation. Once Google blacklists a domain, the browsers start blocking access to it. Or it warns users about the deceptive site ahead. This also results in up to 90% traffic loss. Tragic.
3. And finally, imagine a website makes it on the listed of the malicious database of some desktop antivirus. Then all visitors get blocked by that antivirus. In this case, traffic loss depends on how popular the antivirus is.

Domain reputation risk

So far, we’ve been talking about the technical issues. But let’s also consider the reputational risks. You know the feels when you’re opening a website and you get Google-flags like “Deceptive site ahead” or “Phishing website”, or virus alerts popping from.

Effects of Blacklisting

These alerts leave visitors with a bad taste in their mouth about both the website and the company. So, in order to start avoiding it, let’s find out the cause.

Why does a site get blacklisted?

• Website compromise and infection

A hacker or bot can infiltrate a website to upload or inject a payload into the legitimate scripts. In other words, inject a phishing page, hidden redirect or malicious piece of code. As soon as a website starts threatening visitors, it gets blacklisted by antiviruses or a search engine.

• Visitor’s complain

If a visitor finds illegal content, deceitful advertising or any evidence of security threat, he can submit a request to an antivirus service. Reporting the dangerous resource. And if the threat’s confirmed by a malware analyst, then submitted domain gets banned.

• Blocked for spam

When a website starts sending out spam, its IP or domain gets blacklisted by antispam services such as SpamCop or SpamHaus. This may cause problems in delivering emails or flagging them as spam.

But remember that spam doesn’t necessarily mean the website has been hacked. The root cause may be a feedback form or user registration process which produces tons of outgoing emails. Particularly during spam registrations by spam bots.

Another reason is vulnerable scripts, which allow unregistered user sending emails to an arbitrary receiver. Remember the vulnerable VirtueMart recommendatory component in Joomla 2.5.

What happens after a domain reputation gets damaged?

If a domain reputation is damaged, it usually takes up to several weeks to remove it from the list, depending on the service you use. But the fastest blacklist removal process is for Google. It’s a couple of days for automatic penalties, but you need it to resolve the issue tentatively. For example, removing a malware or phishing page from the website before submitting a report to Google Console.

As for the antivirus services – some of them are completely inert and it may take up to a month or even longer to complete requested de-listing.  Usually you can submit a form and mark a “false positive” or “false negative” as a reason, then website URL and contact details. After that – just wait for a resolution.

How to avoid breaking your domain reputation

OK, now we’ve learnt why the blacklisting happens and how. But how do you avoid this? Or at least, how do you reduce a bad impact or the probable incoming issues we mentioned? The solution is website security monitoring.

The main reason to monitor is to identify the problem at the earliest stage and to mitigate it. In case of a prompt detection, a web specialist can quickly solve the problem. For example, removing a phishing page or a hidden redirect. So the security issue won’t be found and the domain gets to save face.

But surely there’s a more reliable option? Like preventing website security risks in advance? One that lets you take technical precautions like web application firewalls and server hardening. And organizational measures, like developing safety guidelines for web-administrators. The good news is that there is such a simple and effective solution – installing Revisium Antivirus for Plesk.

It will scan your websites for malware and check your domain reputation. The free version has no limitations regarding the number of websites you can check. And it also has no trial period. Meanwhile, the more elite Premium version enables automatic malware cleanup and scheduled scanning with email notifications.

It will scan once per day/week/month, depending on your user settings. And it will notify the site administrator on files infection or domain blacklisting via email. If this sounds like something you’re missing, better click below to find out how you can benefit.

There are plenty of these kind of channels – so how did we choose the best business YouTube channels for you? We focused on a few themes: Internet business, instruction, and inspiration. Even if you’re not responsible for this sphere right now, it’s smart  to stay on top of things in order to grow your business and keep it thriving. So here are a few good videos to munch on and get you in the loop.

The best business YouTube Channels

1. Business Insider

Best known for their articles, Business Insider also has a thriving YouTube channel. The best part of the channel is the industry-specific videos. You will even find some gadget reviews here. Business Insider might not replace the New York Times anytime soon, but it is a fun way to get new business ideas and news.

Best YouTube videos from Business Insider:

• Retail. Worth checking out if you are in the e-commerce or retail industry. The “How All You Can Eat Restaurants Make Money” is particularly eye-opening.
• Finance. You will find a blend of financial news and personal finance in this playlist.

2. GaryVee

Once known as an online wine expert, Gary Vaynerchuk is the founder of a successful international digital agency. Gary has several types of video content – a daily video blog (DailyVee), a question and answer show (AskGaryVee), conference keynote presentations and more. If you’re a developer based in the agency world, Gary’s channel has lessons for you.

Best YouTube videos for aspiring or current small business owners:

• You Can’t Treat Social Media Like a One Nighter (Conference Keynote)
• The Most Important Questions to Ask New Clients (AskGaryVee)

3. Russell Brunson

Internet marketing expert Russell Brunson is someone to follow. Best known as the co-founder of ClickFunnels, a marketing automation software company, Brunson has a strong background in direct marketing.

What we like most about Brunson is his excitement about marketing and his conviction that a funnel is often better than a traditional website. Whether or not you use ClickFunnels or read his books, his YouTube channel has excellent framework and marketing advice.

Best YouTube videos from Russell Brunson:

• How To Find Your “BIG IDEA” – How do you make your product stand out? One answer is to use Brunson’s “Big Idea” concept.
• The “24 Hour” Funnel Hack-A-Thon – You thought hackathons were only for developers? Think again. In this 47-minute video inspired by “24,” you’ll see how Brunson and his team build marketing funnels for several businesses. It is an excellent micro-lesson in marketing concepts such as upsells, average cart value and advertising.

After you watch the best business YouTube channels

Watching a few YouTube videos is a fun way to pass a Friday afternoon. But if you want to pick up some new skills, you need more than a simple 5-minute video session. That’s right – get to practicing and put it into action in your own life. Give at least 30 minutes a day to topic youive watched – and brainstorm, plan, build. You’ll get there sooner than you think!

Pop a comment below if you’ve subscribed to any of the best business YouTube channels we’ve mentioned. Or tell us if you agree with our list on Facebook or Twitter. In the meantime, we’ve got some cool advice on how to start your web development business from scratch and take it to success. Give it a read!

So as of today 16:00 UTC / 18:00 CEST, the new Roundcube responsive skin by Kolab will go live for Plesk Premium Email customers. And because Plesk has contributed greatly to its creation, we get to be the first to give it a whirl! Here’s why you should be excited about Kolab’s new feature.

About the new Roundcube Responsive Skin

The Elastic skin is, as you’ve heard by now, responsive. Hence, it adapts its interface to the real estate available to your device. Regardless if you’ve got the tiniest mobile phone, a tablet or a large desktop system.

Naturally, if you’ve already got Plesk Premium Email, you’ll get the responsive skin. And since you’re a Plesk Premium Email customer, you’ll get it immediately after the launch this afternoon. Before all other Roundcube users worldwide. You’ll also have calendar, tasks, notes, and file cloud features available for all kinds of device sizes.

Now, since we are the first to test this new feature, Kolab would like our feedback on which skin version wins: Is it the current “light” version or the “darker” stuff? Let us know on Facebook and Twitter.

Here are the roll-out details

The new Roundcube Responsive skin comes in these package updates:

• roundcubemail 1.4
  • Note: This update makes the “Out of Office” interface available.
• roundcubemail-plugins-kolab 3.4
• roundcubemail-plugin-contextmenu 3.0
• roundcubemail-skin-plesk 0.4
• roundcubemail-skin-plesk-larry 0.3

If you install Plesk Premium Email or have a subscription with Plesk Premium Email permission enabled, your systems will update. And you’ll enjoy the new responsive skin on your Roundcube webmail installations.

Getting new Roundcube Responsive Skin

If you have enabled automatic system updates in your Plesk installation you’ll receive the new responsive skin automatically. Otherwise you can install the updates via the Plesk’s UI by using the System Updates tool (“Tools & Settings” -> “System Updates”).

Of course the update can also be installed from the command line:

Via Plesk Update Manager

# /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/pum –verbose –update –unsafe

Using the native CentOS 7 / RHEL 7 package manager:

# yum -y update

Using the native Debian 8 / 9 or Ubuntu 16.04 package manager:

# apt-get update ; apt-get -y upgrade kolab-plesk

How to switch back to the older skin version

You’ll be able to switch back to the old skin in any of the following ways:

1. Edit /etc/roundcubemail/config.inc.php, and change $config[‘skin’] from ‘plesk’ to ‘plesk-larry’.

This change applies globally and to all existing customers, current and future.

2. Provide a file /etc/roundcubemail/<VHOST_NAME>/config.inc.php with the following contents. The vhost name is the value $_SERVER[‘HTTP_HOST’] header used, i.e. ‘webmail.kolab-customer.maipo.whd.pxts.ch’.

<?php
$config[‘skin’] = ‘plesk-larry’;

As may be clear, this change only applies to the specific domain’s webmail interface.

3. (Not recommended): Unlock user’s discretionary selection of skins by removing the ‘skin’ item from the $config[‘dont_override’] in /etc/roundcubemail/config.inc.php. This would apply globally, and can be selectively applied by ejecting ‘skin’ from $config[‘dont_override’] on a per-vhost basis such as described above;

<?php
$config[‘dont_override’] = array_diff(
$config[‘dont_override’], array(‘skin’)
);

We don’t recommend you do this, however, because the following skins would become available for selection:

• “Classic”,
• “Larry”,
• “Elastic”,
• “Plesk Premium Email (Larry Version)”,
• “Plesk Premium Email (Responsive Version)”

A system administrator can choose to make the selected skins unavailable by changing the chmod on /usr/share/roundcubemail/skins/<SKIN> to 0700. But this is not supported in the packaging, so you’d have to repeat it after any updates are applied.

Meanwhile, you could be getting too much trash in your inbox. Can SPF, DKIM and DMARC free you from junk emails? Learn more.

Today we’re happily announcing a new member of the Plesk family: London-based SolusVM from OnApp. Thousands of service providers flock to use this virtual server management system that offers Infrastructure-as-a-Service hosting. And we believe this acquisition will boost Plesk’s offering in multiple ways. Read on to see how.

Who are SolusVM and OnApp?

SolusVM is a virtual private server (VPS) and IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) management system. It’s designed for cloud service providers, their resellers and end-customers. With a web-based and customizable UI to manage infrastructure, it integrates popular billing systems and supports several of the most widely used virtualization technologies. Learn more about SolusVM here.

OnApp provides software, services and expertise to help thousands of MSPs and telcos build and grow successful cloud services businesses. Their offerings include OnApp Cloud, OnApp for VMware, OnApp CDN, and the OnApp Federation. Find out more about OnApp here.

How will the SolusVM acquisition work?

Plesk is acquiring all SolusVM assets and will carry on its growth strategy. Thus, elevating it from a single server control panel to a future-proof cloud platform. We’ll provide both cloud service providers and web professionals a single pane of glass application that will become the future of WebOps. 

The SolusVM team, led by Phill Bandelow, will become an integral part of the growing Plesk R&D team. This acquisition will also propel forward development and innovation of the next version of SolusVM. 

Why is this good news for Plesk customers?

Because of this acquisition, our leading WebOps platform will now have a complete solution. It will allow total control over as many VPS accounts as your hardware and resources can support. Our services will also cover the complete spectrum of modern IaaS solutions. And finally, you can now access the widest portfolio of hosting solutions to run, automate and scale your apps, sites and businesses.

How does this positively impact Plesk partners?

Clients and partners will get the same excellent support, product development and relationships they had before. But now, we have combined skills, resources, products and services to provide a bigger, more complementary, end-to-end solution portfolio. Furthermore, we’ll help our clients leverage their IT investments in SolusVM, while adding the requirements to meet their business needs.

Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Or drop us a comment below for questions, or just to tell us what you think!

WordPress has been around for quite some time now – 14 years to be precise. In the time since its initial release back in 2003, it’s become the most popular CMS (content management system) for everyone looking to build a website. In fact, almost 30% of the entire internet runs on WordPress. And the platform claims almost half of the entire CMS market. So you can’t really argue its dominance.

There are a number of advantages to using WordPress that have allowed it to stay ahead of other CMS out there. Now we’re exploring the five critical factors that have helped the platform maintain its reign on the web

1. It’s open source and free

This is probably the biggest reason why WordPress is the most popular CMS. First off, it’s free to download and free to use, so you’re saving money from the get go. There’s more to it than that though. It’s also open source which means it’s constantly up-to-date and and upgraded. There have been 32 major versions since its inception, with new updates released every five months on average.

Despite being around for over a decade, WordPress is still the fastest growing CMS with over 500 new websites being developed every day on the platform. Every second, 17 users hit the “Publish” button on a new blog post they’ve uploaded onto WordPress.

2. It’s very easy to use

WordPress is very user friendly. If you spend a couple of hours exploring the backend of a website built on WordPress, you’ll see just how easy it is to use. One huge advantage is that it needs little to no coding skills, unlike different content management systems like Drupal. If you have some basic HTML knowledge, you can perform almost any task with WordPress.

This is what really sets it apart and makes it the most popular CMS. Because anyone can just install it and start using it straight away. According to recent data, 50% of users in the US work with WordPress. With the runners-up Drupal and Joomla barley making up half that figure combined.

3. It’s SEO-friendly

4. It’s highly customizable

Another reason why WordPress has become the most popular CMS over the years. You can use it to build any type of website imaginable. WordPress powers 15% of the top 100 websites in the world, including major brands like CNN, Time, Fortune and TechCrunch. It’s extremely versatile and highly customizable. Therefore, you can use it to build anything from simple blog-style websites and portfolios to more complex e-commerce sites and large-scale government websites.

5. It has a plugin for almost everything

There are more than 50,000 different open source plugins you can install to add value to a WordPress website. You can find everything from anti-spam filters, SEO tools, popup modules and interactive image plugins online. Many of these plugins are also free and constantly updated by a community of dedicated professionals.

A complete toolkit for Advanced WordPress Users

As time flew by, WordPress has grown and evolved into a sprawling and complex platform. Thus, advanced users need plenty of moving parts to use and manage their projects successfully. Thanks to software like the WordPress Toolkit by Plesk, you can quickly upgrade your WordPress experience. Hence, simplifying the work that goes into setting up, securing and maintaining your websites.

This is thanks to the centralized dashboard where you can monitor several WordPress instances at the same time. It also lets you implement changes across multiple instances at the same time, saving you the hassle of having to do this manually. This also applies to updates and by enabling maintenance mode you can update everything simultaneously.

Plesk’s WordPress toolkit lets you identify and secure all of your core data with the click of a button. Moreover, you can restore your site back to previous versions if something goes wrong. On the SEO front, you can enable site indexing for search engines too. And even disable it for those instances where you don’t want Google to crawl your site.

Toolkits like this one are yet another reason why WordPress has prevailed as the most popular CMS. This complete toolkit for WordPress allows you to experience the CMS better than ever before.Learn more about it below and get ahead of the curve.

1. Check your skills: Technical and sales

But what else do you need? Sales and marketing skills. If sales are unfamiliar to you, keep this in mind. As Chris Gillespie writes, “Real sales is about matchmaking – about putting relevant products in front of people.”

Now that you know your way around the fundamentals let’s dive into how to get your first few clients.