What’s New In WPCloudDeploy 4.5.0

Version 4.5 of WPCloudDeploy is slowly being rolled out to customers. It brings with it a number of new features including our first direct DNS integration, support for new WooCommerce integrated functions, new white label functions and more.

New: CloudFlare DNS Integration

Up till now WPCD has not had a native integration with any DNS service provider. That changes with this release with the inclusion of basic support for CloudFlare.

New sites will be given a randomly generated temporary domain which will also be added to CloudFlare’s DNS automatically. Users can still specify a different domain for their new site, overriding the temporary one.

This makes it easy to just start using a new WP site, especially if all you’re looking to do is fire up a temporary site.

New: Unlimited Server “Size” Labels

In prior versions we allowed admins to map “small”, “medium” and “large” server sizes to one of the sizes at a provider. This simplified end user choices when selling servers with WooCommerce.

In this version we have added the ability for admins to define additional size labels. For example admins might want to add “Tiny” and “Extra-large” server sizes.

New: Change Provider Descriptions

You can now provide an alternative description for a provider in the providers’ settings screen. This helps when you’re selling server subscriptions and do not want to provide information about the underlying providers you’re using.

New: Control PHP Processes

You can now restart and check the status of the PHP process for all versions of PHP.

Dev: Internal Support For Additional WooCommerce Related Functions

In addition to stripping out most of the core WooCommerce functions into their own plugins, we have also added a ton of support functions for those plugins. This includes a new way of processing tasks in the background (“Pending Tasks”) .

Dev: Pending Tasks

This is the start of a feature where we’ll be able to run additional tasks in the background. It’s being used by the WooCommerce add-ons for now but in the future we’ll be able to use it to perform operations on multiple servers and sites in one shot.

Fixes And Tweaks

• When saving settings we clear all caches for all providers. This is an attempt to make some of the functions on the screen a little less confusing while not completely killing performance.
• Some servers would not notify the plugin after a reboot because network services were not started.
• Fixed an issue where domain changes would mangle the new domains’ NGINX configuration files in certain edge cases.

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Features Added Between 4.3 and 4.5

We didn’t publish a “New Features” article for the releases between 4.3.0 and this new release (4.5.) so we’ll list those out here:

Scheduled Server Reboots

We added an option to allow admins to schedule server restarts for later. A tiny but useful feature when the server needs to be restarted after a background update but you really don’t want to do it during production hours.

Fixes And Tweaks

• Force log files to be downloaded instead of being displayed in a browser as text files.
• Fixed a few spelling errors.
• Fixed an edge-case issue with the Backup V2 script where restores might sometimes corrupt some things – the cure being worse than the disease. This was an embarrassing one.
• Cron processes weren’t loading plugins which meant that some wp crons ran only once and then exited.
• Domain changes sometimes left some stray ssh related folders around.
• Added a few more hooks and filters for devs.

Wrap Up

This release is available for download in all our customers accounts. It is still a fast ring version right now but will be available shortly as a full production release.