Black Friday 2019
Some of you might have seen the Black Friday promo pop-up on our landing page.
As that pop-up says, our Black Friday deal is coming soon, and it’s going to be a fun one!
Ground Rules
- We put 500 licenses for sale during Black Friday at promo rates;
- The promo will run from Nov 11 – 30 OR until the 500 licenses are sold out, whatever happens first;
- We will have two different discount tiers: 35% OFF and 45% OFF.
Waiting List
To get the 45% discount rate you will need to signup for the waiting list (the form that pops up on the landing page). The form is also available here. The form is now closed.
You’ll be able to signup until 05:59 pm EST on November 11. After that, the deal will go live and all the subscribers on the waiting list will get an email with an exclusive link to a single-use coupon code.
The pop-up has been upon for little more than 24h and we’re already about to hit the 100 subscribers mark. Sign-up while you can!
Tips
- Coupons will be generated based on your email address and they will all be single-use coupons, so if you are planning to get more than one license, you will need to enter two different email addresses to the waiting list.
On Monday, Nov 11, 6 pm EST…
…the deal will go live for everyone (including those on the waiting list).
If you were not previously on the waiting list, you’ll still get a good deal out of it – 35% OFF.
You’ll have another chance to win back that extra 10%, but that will require some work on your part! So I recommend signing up for the waiting list as soon as possible.
FAQ
- Why limit the number of licenses being sold?
- Although we’d love to have you as a customer, we have a large user base that requires our support and assistance. One of our top priorities now is to make sure we will be able to handle the flux of new users without compromising support and development efforts.
- Was there a similar limitation on last year’s BF?
- Yes, we limited the number of licenses sold to 300, and it only took us 5 days to reach that mark back then.
Let me know if you have any questions!
Weekly Webinars, Office Hours, Forums, Roadmap, and More!
Hello everyone,
After WordCamp US and a lot of reflection, it’s time to put some things out there. I hope you all enjoy the reading!
The elephant in the room: WP Ultimo 2.0
During WordCamp US I had the opportunity to talk with lots and lots of product people and learn a lot from their experiences. During the trip back home, I had time to reflect on their tips and to think about the best ways to move WP Ultimo (and our other projects) forward.
Anyone that had the curiosity of taking a look at WP Ultimo’s code will agree that it is a beast. It does so much and it touches all of the messiest elements of WP Multisite. It’s hard code to write, harder to maintain, and even harder to make performant. Yet, we just love to write it.
A huge part of that code was rewritten pretty much from scratch for 2.0, mostly to remove some barriers they had put in place and allow us to have a strong foundation to build the new features. However, the results are still not optimal and not on a level I’m comfortable putting forward.
I admit I was not able to deal with the pressure very well, which lead to lots of deadlines being thrown out. I understand that, for some, this damages the trust I think is so valuable to create between a product developer and their customers and only actions can re-build that.
That pressure ultimately hurt our productivity as a team and we ended up rushing code that should never be rushed. The truth is that between testing, making sure the different modules work seamlessly among them, database migrations, and cleaning the code up there’s still a lot to be done.
I won’t give a new deadline for 2.0 until I’m 100% sure it is ready for public testing, but I won’t leave you guys in the dark anymore. Which leads us to…
Weekly Webinars
There are some workflows that I believe would greatly benefit from inputs from our Community – you! And there are some CRAAAAZY new features we’re adding that we’d love to show to you. I vented this idea before but never actually got to it. It’s time to change that.
During the next week (Nov 11-15), we’ll use the Facebook Group to decide a weekday and time to host a weekly webinar, open to anyone that wishes to participate. The idea here is to discuss workflows, ideas, feature suggestions, the roadmap, and get to know each other!
Office Hours
One little experiment I always wanted to run is having office hours, so starting next week, most Wednesday and Thursday I’ll have office hours between 12 pm – 14 pm EST.
You can book a 20-min block on that window and we’ll chat via Zoom. It doesn’t necessarily need to be WP Ultimo-related. We can discuss your WaaS idea, a feature suggestion you have, a bug you’re experiencing, a workflow you think needs improvement, etc.
You should be able to book the slots at Calendly – Arindo Duque.
Say Bye-Bye to the Forums, say Hi to the WP Ultimo Users Group
When I joined the Facebook group I was amazed by the level of engagement the posts there had. Although I recognize the WP Ultimo Forums played a great role in the past, I don’t see much sense in keeping them as a channel for discussion when all the talking is already going on elsewhere.
That means we’ll be disabling the forums later this month.
New posts will be locked and signups will no longer be available. The topics will be left there for reference, but nothing more.
This also means that you should join the Facebook Group if you’re still not part of it.
Say Bye-Bye to Trello, say Hi to Feedbear
Trello is a great tool, but it was never meant to be used as a public roadmap where people would actually be able to report bugs, suggest new features, and vote for the features they like the most.
We were given a FeedBear license (thanks, Fernando Arbex!) and that’s the right software for that task. During the month of November, we’ll be moving the Trello Roadmap to FeedBear (please, do not add suggestions and bug reports on there yet!).
Black Friday
It’s that time of the year again! We have some great plans for this year’s promo, but I’ll talk more about that later…
Well, I think that’s all for today. I would sincerely like to hear your opinions on that, so leave a comment below.
WordPress Multisite Security: Say hello to our official security partner, WebARX!
The WaaS (a.k.a WordPress as a service) model is getting more and more popular with digital agencies who wish to offer a fully managed service to their customers. WP Ultimo has simplified this process for many agencies worldwide.
While making the management of a network of sites easier with WP Ultimo, thanks to our integration partner WebARX, you can now also have better security coverage across all your sites and networks.
WebARX took an extra mile to specifically build out Multisite support around WP Ultimo architecture by analyzing and optimizing each and every aspect of protecting Multisite networks and WaaS solutions built with WP Ultimo.
Introducing WebARX, our official security partner
WebARX is a comprehensive security platform with managed endpoint firewall, security monitoring and with remote hardening options to keep your sites protected from plugin vulnerabilities, brute-force attacks and all kinds of malicious traffic.
Additionally to WordPress, WebARX supports Joomla, Magento, Drupal and even generic web apps built on PHP.
Integration with WebARX allows you to manage security within your WordPress Multisite network with ease. Everything can be managed directly from a single security dashboard and you can even have multiple networks within a single WebARX dashboard.
Setting up Multisite security with WebARX
Setting up WebARX on your Multisite network is as easy as following the Multisite setup wizard after installing the WebARX plugin to the core-site.
Right after you have installed WebARX to your network, you will be asked to choose the sites within the network where you want WebARX to be turned on, and which sites you’d like to add to security monitoring via WebARX dashboard. Sites you select will magically appear on your WebARX account.
Once you activate the plugin on the network, you can then set global security settings for all the sites.
Different options will be available for:
- Website Hardening, Firewall
- Login Protection
- Cookie Notice (You can see a cookie notice message powered by WebARX also on wpultimo.com).
What is WebARX?
Once you click on any of the sites you have on your WebARX dashboard, you will have a detailed security overview for each site. Just click on any of the sites as shown here:
You will then see a detailed site view where you can set email and slack notifications, see detailed security monitoring results and much more.
You will be able to see:
- The details of every attack blocked on each website
- Uptime monitoring
- Error monitoring
- Activity logs (such as by whom/when/where posts were edited, uploaded media files to the sites, etc.), Hardening settings
- Plugin versions
- Users
- and more.
Firewall logs:
Once you click on the Firewall tab, you will see all the details about malicious traffic blocked from accessing your website. You will see the list of IPs being blocked to access the site under the sub-tab Banned IP Addresses where you can analyze them and un-ban them.
Uptime/Error logs:
WebARX helps you to monitor the uptime of each and every domain on your Multisite network. Once every hour, WebARX checks which HTTP response code the site serves.
Activity logs:
Activity logs can be helpful whenever you need to look back in time to find out who was administering or editing any of the sites within the Multisite network.
It will give you a clear understanding of who logged in, signed up, edited posts, edited users or uploaded any media to the website, with minute precision.
WordPress Hardening:
WebARX allows you to manage WordPress hardening settings remotely.
Some of the mentionable features would be login protection, ReCaptcha setup, two-factor authentication, login rate-limiting, HTTP security header configurations, cookie notice policy management and much, much more. See the full list here.
WordPress Plugin Management:
Plugins and components such as themes, etc. are in the center of the focus for WebARX.
Based on the studies from the last year, a whopping 98% of security vulnerabilities within the WordPress ecosystem comes from third-party components such as vulnerable plugins and themes.
WebARX allows you to monitor vulnerabilities within the plugins (you can also get alerts on Slack and email if any of the plugins are vulnerable) and you can update/deactivate/delete them directly from WebARX portal.
Not your regular website firewall
WebARX has really put their focus on proactive prevention and that’s one of the reasons why they currently don’t do file scanning, but instead have invested heavily into an advanced, flexible endpoint firewall engine. You can read from here, what are the differences between a cloud-based and endpoint web application firewall.
By default, whenever you install WebARX to any of the sites the firewall will get specific protection modules enabled.
For example, if you enable WebARX on a WordPress website, you will get 2 modules activated by default – OWASP module and WordPress Virtual Patches module.
OWASP module protects your site from 0days and from the top 10 web application vulnerabilities such as SQLi, XSS, etc. while the WordPress Virtual Patches module will get your site very specific rules to block attacks against plugin vulnerabilities.
Additionally, you have complete freedom of creating your own rules and assigning to them across all your websites.
You can assign new rules across multiple Multisite networks or even across sites running different content management systems.
You have the freedom to match anything within the HTTP protocol and choose what do you want to do with the matching traffic. Currently, you can either Block, Log or Redirect traffic based on your custom rules. Check out some examples here.
While creating custom rules can be a bit technical, OWASP and Virtual Patches modules are maintained by the WebARX team and updated on a regular basis.
WebARX even has a competitive advantage thanks to its bug bounty platform (plugbounty.com) where they crowdsource threat intelligence about plugin vulnerabilities.
White-labeled PDF reports for your customers
The best way to show your customers that you care is to send out monthly security reports showing that you’ve taken care of their site and how many attacks you’ve been blocking to keep it up and safe.
WebARX allows you to generate PDF reports and even set automatic generation on a monthly basis.
By activating a white-labeling add-on, you can add your own company logo to each of those reports before you send them out to your clients.
Access management
If you’re running your WaaS project or you’re an agency, you most probably have more than one person who takes care of the customer’s sites. You can create multiple WebARX accounts and choose what permissions they have.
You can choose between four user types:
- Leader
- Admin
- Manager
- Member
Website malware removal guarantee
If you’re serious about security and want to cover every corner, WebARX also offers a website malware removal guarantee.
Whenever something happens to your site, they will have a forensics team jump in, collect evidence, clean up the site and get back to you with a detailed report on what happened and how to improve the security of your current infrastructure. You can read more about the website malware removal guarantee here.
Lastly, a discount for WP Ultimo users
October is the national cyber-security awareness month and If you’re already a WP Ultimo user, you can get a 50% discount from all WebARX plans. Just be sure to use the coupon code “wpultimo”. The promo is valid until November 8th, 2019.
If you have more than 30 sites on your Multisite network, WebARX has agreed to do a special agency plan (all add-ons, guarantees included) offer to anyone who is interested.
You can also get a full malware removal guarantee for the sites you want. This means whenever something happens to the site, the WebARX team will jump in and get it cleaned up. You can read more about it here.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to the WebARX team at webarxsecurity.com, open up the Chat from the bottom-right corner and say you’re a WP Ultimo customer, you’ll get a warm welcome and all your questions answered!
Stay safe!
Release Notes – WP Ultimo 1.10.4
Hello, everyone!
WP Ultimo 1.10.4 is here and we have a couple of important things to share with you.
Stripe SCA Update
Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) came into force on September 14, 2019.
The rule is a requirement of the European Union Revised Directive on Payment Services (PSD2) and establishes that electronic payments need to be performed with multi-factor authentication, to increase their security.
After SCA, payment flows that don’t meet these requirements may be refused by customers’ banks.
In order to prevent such headache, WP Ultimo 1.10.4 brings the new Stripe checkout, which is already compatible with this directive. You can check Stripe SCA video and more by clicking here.
Runcloud.io v.2 API Support
WP Ultimo was using the old Runcloud API, and the 2.0 release of their API broke our domain mapping integration. WP Ultimo 1.10.4 updates our code to make use of their new API.
There is no need to make any local changes or settings adjustments. The Runcloud.io Configuration tutorial is still the same, only the code implementation differs.
And as a bonus, Runcloud is now on our list of host integrations with auto-SSL support – since the new API offers it – alongside with Closte, WPMU DEV, and CPanel. WP Ultimo will automatically redeploy your SSL certificate on RunCloud, which allows the newly added domains to be included on the new certificate.
You can check our Changelog to see everything that comes with WP Ultimo version 1.10.4.
Other things you should know about
Our Admin Themes are not on CodeCanyon anymore
We finally transitioned our admin themes to a recurring revenue model as well, removing them from CodeCanyon. We wrote a post explaining the reasons why.
To celebrate the move, we are offering 30% OFF on the Lifetime option for both of them until September 30: Just use the coupon code NEWHOME during checkout. Visit Material WP and PRO Theme websites, where the Admin Themes are now sold.
Note: The themes are available as add-ons for WP Ultimo on the Lifetime and Pro plans, but that version does not support stand-alone use (being used without WP Ultimo). These are the stand-alone versions =)
We are happy to be part of The Grand Ecommerce Giveaway 2019, by Cloudways
This year, WP Ultimo and WP Admin Pages PRO – another one of the plugins developed by NextPress – are part of this awesome contest promoted by Cloudways.
On this edition, the giveaway is worth more than $175,000 and you can win this by participating in the contest! Just click here to learn more about this initiative and here to start your journey to win!
WP Ultimo 2.0 Beta Release
As an update about WP Ultimo 2.0, we’re finally getting there. A feature-freeze beta version will be available for testing on September 30. Keep an eye on the announcement card on the Trello Roadmap for more info and updates.
We hope you enjoy all the news as much as we do!
Kind Regards.
Updates on 2.0
Hey guys.
So, I feel really bad and the past few weeks that should have been great (since things have been great for business in general) were kind of a train-wreck, both mentally and in terms of work.
My original expectation is that the increased support/pre-sale questions load would return to normal as time went by, but the load has been growing and growing (despite some apparent dips). Not sure if Google has understood that we are the only option available now, but even with the reduced amount of direct WPMU DEV refers, our organic reach increased by a lot.
This is great for business because we are selling more licenses, Annual Recurring Revenue is growing and we are solidifying the company as a whole. However, the effects on my state of mind have not been so great, and a huge part of it is that I have this constant feeling of frustration and of “letting you guys down” on 2.0 progress.
I had to spend most of the past weeks either working long hours on the Migrator or working long hours helping Ruel on support. Even Marcelo (our other dev) and Juliana (which should mostly be writing documentation stuff) are now spending most of the time helping with support as well.
The past few weeks taught me a lot though, and I would like to share that with you all:
- I’m the bottleneck of the company. I’m not sure if this is due to the fact that I was a ‘solopreneur’ for so long, but I’m really bad at delegating and at creating processes that allow things to move without my direct oversight/interference. Basic things like refunding a license on the 30-day money back guarantee period have to go through me at the moment. One of my main goals is to make the entire operation “me-independent” as soon as possible.
- This is kind of a consequence of the first point, but I’m hugely underutilizing Ruel, our support manager. He will be taking a more active place in managing the forums, Trello, refunds, and other stuff a support manager should be doing.
- The increase in revenue gives me the leeway to confidently grow the team: we’ll be soon adding another support agent, another full-time developer and an intern will be joining us soon as well, bringing our total headcount to 7 people.
- Working on the Migrator made us realize what Pro Sites did right, especially in terms of performance and database modeling for multi-currency support and other features like that. I still think that a lot of the decisions we made on WP Ultimo are the right ones, but having to read almost every line of code of Pro Sites gave us great insight that we can now use to improve WP Ultimo even more.
- Choosing to work on a monolithic 2.0 release with all those new features was probably a bad decision given the position we were in and now it is probably too late to fix it. We will resume intermediate releases (1.9.X) with smaller, but important stuff, while we continue to work on the bigger stuff for 2.0. Some of the things that are ready to ship but are inside 2.0 might be released earlier in a 1.9.X release (examples include support to Cloudways SSL support, mass coupon generation, etc).
I’ll have to give you an update on a timeline later this month, but it is possible we won’t have an Ultimo 2.0 release until the end of July. We don’t want to push out something that is rushed or buggy. There are networks with 5-7k sites running our software and we can’t afford to do that.
I feel like I ask this every other week now, but I hope you guys understand.
Kind regards,
Arindo Duque,
Founder of NextPress
The Pro Sites – WP Ultimo Migrator is here!
Hey there!
As many of you might know by now, WPMU DEV gave us a shout out while announcing they were setting over 90% of their Premium plugins free .
Pro Sites was one of those plugins, and as soon as we heard the news we started to work on a solution that could help those who wanted to move their networks from Pro Sites to WP Ultimo, a migrator of sorts.
After two weeks of hard labor, here it is! The Pro Sites → WP Ultimo Migrator has arrived.
We know: switching a premium network from one platform to another might sound scary.
Our Migrator should be able to do 99% of the heavy-lifting for you in a completely automated way: Settings, API Keys, Coupons, Plans, Subscriptions, Transactions, Mappings. All that gets converted into data WP Ultimo can understand and you are pretty much ready to rock your WP Ultimo network after a couple of minutes.
The entire migration takes the form wizard that guides you through the process and you can check the tutorial we wrote about it here .
The Migrator is available as a free add-on and can be installed directly from the network admin panel on WP Ultimo → Add-ons.
The migrator also requires WP Ultimo version 1.9.11 to be installed, which in addition to fixing some small bugs, also adds support to domain mapping syncing to WPMU DEV’s new managed hosting with no extra configuration steps required on your part.
If you are interested in seeing the Migrator in action, we’ll be doing a live webinar on the WP Builds Facebook group this Thursday (June 6). Here’s the link to the event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1871222949646541/. You’ll have to join the group to participate, which you should have done by now anyways! They are a great community.
UPDATE: You can watch the complete webinar by clicking on this link!
Important Notice:
Despite having a lot of features in common, Pro Sites and WP Ultimo do have some differences. This inevitably means that, by migrating, you will lose some features, gain others, and have to learn how to manage your network the WP Ultimo way.
So, please, make sure you read this post to understand all these details.
Let us know if you have any questions!
We are here to help you on that journey!
Hey there, Pro Sites user!
tl;dr version: WP Ultimo aims to achieve the same goal as Pro Sites – allow you to create a network of premium sites – and can serve as a replacement. However, it does things a bit differently from what you might be used to, so it’s important to check that out and this post might help you. Also, we are working on a migration tool and there’s a form below where you can signup to be notified when it’s out.
Introduction
Hey there,
My name is Arindo and I’m the creator of WP Ultimo.
If you clicked the link at the top of our main page, it probably means that you ended up in our site because of the recent announcement WPMUDEV made about setting 90% of their plugins free, including Pro Sites.
We are getting a lot of questions from Pro Sites users and I think it is a good idea to have a centralized place (this post) with the answers.
Let’s get started:
First of all, what is WP Ultimo?
WP Ultimo is a WordPress multisite plugin that allows you to create a network of Premium Sites. Its value proposition is the same as Pro Sites: you can create different subscription tiers and have customers pay you a recurring fee to have a site hosted in your Multisite network.
In fact, WP Ultimo was created after I needed a solution for a premium network I was building and found that Pro Sites didn’t quite work for the specific requirements of my project. Instead of trying to adapt Pro Sites, I decided to build my own solution from scratch.
This was 2.5 years ago and that codebase is now WP Ultimo.
How do WP Ultimo and Pro Sites compare?
There is quite the feature overlap between Pro Sites and WP Ultimo, despite the difference in approach.
The folks at WPMUDEV kept Pro Sites fairly slim, delegating additional features to separate plugins. Although this made sense for them at the time, it increases the overhead immensely since maintaning a lot of tiny plugins can be very, very time-consuming.
We are a small team of four people, so we have opted to reduce overhead as much as possible. As a result, many of the features that needed additional plugins to be installed are available inside WP Ultimo’s core plugin. We delegate to add-ons just the features that only a minor share of our user base will ever need.
Quick Feature comparison (with links for documentation, when available):
- Blog Templates: Available in WP Ultimo core with a different name, Site Templates – documentation
- Domain Mapping: Available in WP Ultimo core – documentation
- Coupons – Available in WP Ultimo core.
- Setup Fees – Available in WP Ultimo core, you can also set up different setup fees for each plan.
- Subscription Management – Available in WP Ultimo core – documentation
- Payment Gateways: WP Ultimo supports PayPal, Stripe and Manual by default, with an add-on to add WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions as a payment method as well (which basically makes all the WooCommerce gateways available for WP Ultimo use). – documentation.
- Add Ads to free plans: Available on WP Ultimo via a free add-on called WP Ultimo: Ad Injector – documentation.
- White-labeling Plugins and Themes: Available on WP Ultimo via our premium add-on called WP Ultimo: Plugin and Theme Manager – documentation.
In which aspects do WP Ultimo and Pro Sites differ?
As I said in a previous topic, WP Ultimo was born out of a specific set of requirements I had for a project of mine. As a result, I made some decisions that make WP Ultimo and Pro Sites extremely different in some points and this might be a deal-breaker for you.
Signing up
Pro Sites keeps most of its signing-up/upgrading/paying stuff on the front-end. This was something I wanted to avoid as much as possible since my customers would have access to the wp-admin panel and I wanted my registration pages to be independent of the theme I was using on the main site.
As a result, WP Ultimo registration page is located outside the front-end, but not really on the back-end. Our sign-up process is also divided into separate steps. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like, and you can check it live on our demo network.
Customer Account Management
Our customer account management screens are not located on the front-end, but rather on the back-end. We add a new admin page called Account where the customer can see its Billing History, update credit card info, etc.
Contact Point of a Subscription
Pro Sites attaches the subscription to a site, rather than to the user. This means that each pro site = one subscription, even if they belong to the same user.
WP Ultimo does things differently, attaching the subscription to the user instead.
This means that a user can’t have more than one subscription at the moment (this is something we are planning to add on our 2.X releases). That being said, you can allow multiple sites to be created under a single subscription, varying the number of allowed sites in each plan. Something like the following:
- Plan A: Free – Allows for 1 site to be created;
- Plan B: $9,99 – Allows for 3 sites to be created;
- and so on up to unlimited sites.
Are there things WP Ultimo can do that Pro Sites wasn’t able to do?
In the past two and a half years we added a bunch of cool features to WP Ultimo that makes it really unique. Some of these include:
- Domain Mapping integration with Managed WordPress hosting providers: WP Ultimo automatically adds mapped domains to the admin panels of WP Engine, Cloudways, cPanel, RunCloud, Closte and more when a new domain is mapped, so you don’t have to do it manually. In some cases, we’ll even trigger SSL certificate fetching for you – documentation.
- Webhooks: WP Ultimo has a powerful Webhook system that allows you to integrate your network with a number of different services. We even offer direct integration with Zapier, which opens your network to some 1000+ apps and services available in their platform. documentation (webhooks) and documentation (integrating with Zapier).
- The ability to allow your customers to register custom domains on signup – documentation – Only available via OpenSRS now, but we’ll be adding more resellers in the future.
- Support for WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions as payment gateway options – documentation.
- Create powerful Admin Pages to help your customers using your favorite page builder: WP Ultimo has a handy add-on called Admin Pages Creator, which basically allows you to add fully customized Admin Pages to your customers’ dashboard using Elementor, Beaver Builder, and Brizy templates – documentation.
- Two different Admin Themes to customize the dashboard experience of your customers: Check Material WP and PRO.
More advanced Stuff:
- Support to Template Overrides: With WP Ultimo, you can replace the default HTML templates for the signup flow with your own versions without needing to worry about changing core plugin files – documentation.
- Search and Replace API: You can also annotate site templates with placeholders like {{site_name}} and use the Search and Replace API to auto-populate those placeholders with information provided by your customer right after sign-up, automatically – documentation.
Do you have plans to build a Migrator?
Yes, we are already working on it and WPMUDev offered to help us in this endeavor. Be sure to leave your email on the form below and we’ll let you know as soon as we finish it =)
UPDATE: Our Migrator is ready! Click here to read more about it!
Additional Resources
Here are some links that might help you get your head around WP Ultimo and make an informed decision about wether our not WP Ultimo is the right tool for your project.
- Webinar recorded with Nathan Wrigley from WPBuilds.com where we cover almost all the features of WP Ultimo – https://wpultimo.com/how-it-works;
- Our help center, where you can find a bunch of articles covering WP Ultimo functionality;
- Our Community Forums – https://community.wpultimo.com;
- Our Changelogs, so you can see the way that brought us to where we are today, dating all the way back to 2016;
- Our roadmap, where we discuss the future of the plugin with the community.
If you still have questions and want to chat with us directly, click here and say hi!
Comments are also open, so feel free to leave your question down below, if you prefer.
We’re here to help =)
Release Notes – WP Ultimo 1.9.8 and Add-ons
Hello everyone.
WP Ultimo version 1.9.8 is out and, despite not bringing major improvements or new features, it addresses some small issues that were bugging users and super admins alike.
These include:
- Bug in the responsiveness of the template selection step on signup;
- 502 errors on some hosting providers when the Auto Login after Registration option was active;
- Password reset on the sub-sites (redirecting back to the main site is no longer needed).
WP Ultimo 2.0 Beta
We know how much you guys are looking forward to WP Ultimo 2.0. And so are we, here at NextPress HQ.
Unfortunately (and for that we are really, really sorry =/), we had to postpone this launching – which would happen on Monday, 25th – to this Sunday, March 3rd.
We found a small issue while testing some of the new code that might mean we’ll have to make adjustments to the database structure, and we need some time to figure out the best way to make it as future-proof as possible.
Most of the features we promised for 2.0 are ready, though, including the new checkout screen, tax support, and add-on sales (we have some screenshots for you down below). You can keep yourself up-to-date with the development by visiting our public Roadmap.
Add-ons
Today we are also releasing new major and minor versions of some of WP Ultimo’s Add-ons.
Admin Page Creator 1.4.0
This is the biggest release for Admin Page Creator since the addition of Page Builder support on version 1.3.0.
It adds some cool new features, such as External Link support, inline editing for page builders, meta data interpolation, and more.
Stand-alone Version
Since the day we came up with the idea for Admin Page Creator we knew it had potential to become a plugin on its own.
The fact the we were constantly asked by users if they would be able to use it on a single site install, or without WP Ultimo, made us realize we were probably right on our original assumption.
That’s why we’ve just released a stand-alone version of this add-on: a separated plugin that goes by the name of WP Admin Pages PRO
Now, it also has its own Documentation page and its own Roadmap, where you can follow its development progress and suggest new features. Some of the things we plan to add include support to Admin Pages built on Gutenberg and DIVI!
It’s important to highlight that if you are a WP Ultimo user there’s no need to worry. All the features in the plugin and in the add-on are the same, and the add-on will receive the same updates as the plugin.
The only difference lies here: WP Ultimo: Admin Page Creator (the add-on) depends on WP Ultimo’s code, and will only work in Multisite environments with WP Ultimo installed and activated. On the other hand, WP Admin Pages PRO (the stand-alone plugin) works on either single or multisite installs, and you don’t need to have WP Ultimo running to use it!
If you think you have a use case for a stand-alone version of Admin Page Creator, we are offering 50% off for WP Ultimo users! Just use WPULTIMO during checkout on WP Admin Pages PRO.
New Free Add-on: WP Ultimo Language Selector
We are happy to present you WP Ultimo Language Selector!
With our new free add-on, users will be able to switch languages on the sign-up flow and on the login page.
We also prepared a small guide covering the basics of how to set it up and how it works.
WP Ultimo: WooCommerce Integration – 1.2.2
- Setup Fee support added to the WooCommerce Subscription integration/
- Minor bugfixes.
WP Ultimo: Plugin and Theme Manager – 1.2.2
- Minor bugfixes.
Pro Theme – 1.0.1
- Fixes in small compatibility issues with Gutenberg.
Feature Plugin: WP Ultimo Blocks
Since version 5.0, WordPress has a new editor experience: Gutenberg (now simply called the Block Editor). It completely replaces the old post edit screen and adds a new block-based interface. I’m sure you all have seen it, but just in case you were living under a rock over the past few months, here’s what it looks like:
Introducing WP Ultimo Blocks
Gutenberg is a really exciting tool and despite the controversies surrounding its development (a whole different discussion), it opens a lot of cool opportunities and we are eager to experiment on those.
WP Ultimo Blocks is a new Feature Plugin that basically ports our shortcodes to blocks, which you can then use on Gutenberg pages.
Our Blocks
Pricing Table
You can add pricing tables on your Gutenberg pages, selecting which plans you want to display and which colors to use.
Template List
In a similar manner, you can add a Template List block, displaying your available templates. You can select the number of columns, if you want to display the title and filter bar, and, most importantly, which templates you want to appear.
Restrict Content
Now you also have a slick interface to manage restrict content in your main site, check out the demo below!
Notes
This is still pretty experimental, that’s why it is being released as a Feature Plugin. We would love to hear what you think, though! Let us know if you have any ideas about what blocks we can build next!
— Arindo Duque
2019: The Year of Website as a Service (WaaS) – and of WP Ultimo!
The new year has barely started and there’s already a bunch of new stuff going on here in the WP Ultimo HQ! And we are happy to announce a couple of them today!
Meet Juliana and Marcelo!
Some of you might have noticed some new faces on the chat bubble on our main site. That would be me, Juliana, and Marcelo. Two months ago we arrived at NextPress, and since then we’re getting to know everything around here. The goal is to provide even better support and deliver new features and fixes faster and better (1).
(1) and to ease the burden on my back a bit, haha
— Arindo
Marcelo Assis is an experienced WordPress professional that joined our team as a full-time developer, helping with maintaining the add-ons and on pushing WP Ultimo core forward as well. Are you aware that the last Admin Page Creator release (1.3.0) added Brizy and Elementor support in addition to Beaver Builder? Well, that’s Marcelo’s work right there!
Need something? Glad to help you! I’m Juliana Dias, WP Ultimo’s new Community Manager. I’m here to aid community members and to help with questions you may have before and after starting your own network. Also, you can talk to me in English, Spanish and Portuguese =)
A new year, a new way to work:
This year will be awesome, with a lot of changes to come! And all of these changes will be guided by you guys: the WP Ultimo Community.
Speak your mind on the Roadmap!
From now on, WP Ultimo is developed on 6-week-long cycles (we’ve copied this idea from the folks at Basecamp). Once the features that make up a cycle are decided (and we’ll decide them together), we don’t add anything else until that cycle is finished. If we think the features are too large to fit on the 6 weeks after we started to work on them, we will cut some details out until we reach a version that ships in 6 weeks.
The goal here is to have some sort of “contract” with the community and provide better estimates of when things will ship. Arindo does not have a great track record when it comes to giving estimates and he’s aware of it (I know how frustrating this can be, sorry guys – Arindo). This aims to make this less of a problem.
Cycle 1 has already begun and things are right on schedule. Features that will be developed during this first cycle are divided among its 6 weeks, and you can follow everything on our recently updated Roadmap.
After each cycle, we’ll have a cool down period of 1-2 weeks. Here we won’t focus as much on new features, but on making sure the things we added on the previous cycle are working as smoothly as possible, writing documentation, and, most importantly, talking with you to decide what should make into the next cycle.
Developers, developers, developers!
Steve Ballmer has said it all!
In this first quarter of the year, we are also focused on writing better documentation for developers and producing video-tutorials so we can see more and more add-ons developed by third-party shops, which we are already starting to see (check out WaaS PRO and Keypress).
We also aim to improve the Getting Started documentation with video-tutorials covering the basic functionality for people that are just starting out with their Website as a Service platforms.
Group Chats
As Arindo promised last time, we are planning to hold Community Conversations, starting next month. This will be a group chat where we’ll discuss WP Ultimo, people will be able to share what they are doing with the plugin and we will eventually demo features that are under construction. This will be fun! Be sure to subscribe to our mailing list to receive the invitation (don’t worry, if you are a license holder, you are already subscribed =]).
We hope to have you join us in the incredible ride 2019 is going to be!
— Juliana Dias
PS.: If you were having issues with a slow admin panel, we released an update (1.9.6) a few hours ago that addresses it. To learn how to enable updates for WP Ultimo, read this.