Update: There have been some changes from the time the Orion idea has originated. I would highly suggest reading our newest edition of Developer Diary #8! 🙂
2014 was amazing an amazing year for us here at ManageWP – we’ve crossed the 1-million download threshold with over a quarter of a million websites being managed by our service, affirming ManageWP as both the oldest and the most popular WordPress management service on the market.
We haven’t been resting on our laurels, even though we’ve been very quiet lately; for the past six months we’ve hunkered down and started working on the next evolutionary step in WordPress management that we dubbed ManageWP Orion; With your feedback since 2010 and the experience we’ve racked up during that time we’re ready to push the envelope and turn the task of website management into fun. That’s why we’ve chosen the name Orion for our versioning: to boldly go where no WordPress productivity tool has gone before and give you all sorts of new and amazing ways to improve your workflow. We find it only suitable to name our versions after prominent constellations, starting with Orion, one of the most recognizable constellations in the sky.
So what does this mean for you as a user?
- Faster performance: One of the greatest WordPress weaknesses performance-wise has been backward compatibility, which results with the amount of junk code growing with each new release. We’re having none of that; ManageWP has been re-factored from the ground up, removing miles of excess code in the process. This has sped up the ManageWP performance to the point of being instantaneous – stay tuned for a more in-depth explanation in the followup articles.Â
- Asynchronous actions: Progress bar watching is the number one productivity killer in any interface. That’s why we’re saying goodbye to the times of idling while your sites sync or backup completes. Most of the time consuming tasks will be done asynchronously to allow you to focus on other tasks and get the job done faster.
- Usability: Our current dashboard is the crowd favorite, but there’s always room for improvement. A great service needs to work, and it needs to be effortless – that’s what we’re aiming to accomplish with ManageWP Orion.
- Clone Wizard:Â This feature has been given a lot of love, both in the performance and in the error reporting departments as site cloning and migration does not tolerate failures and delays.
- Scheduled Backups: The Orion release is coming with the optimized scheduled backup process, with a lot more optimization in the months to come after Orion is released.
- Client Report: currently our most underdeveloped feature, the Client Report is finally achieving its potential with beautiful in-depth reporting and automation.
In the following month we will be releasing a series of articles focusing on different aspects of our service – design, user experience, security, back end development and more; our team members will discuss best practices they’ve applied in ManageWP Orion, and how they could be applied to your projects as well. The final article will conclude with an invitation for the closed beta, so stay tuned and send us your comments!
UPDATE: The second ManageWP Orion article is out! See it here.
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