Our old dashboard has served us well for over year but it’s time to change — some of the upcoming features we’ve planned for Pressjitsu require a simpler and more scalable dashboard design. In this post we’ll cover some of the changes we have already implemented, and some things we plan to roll out very soon.
A New Design
If you’re a Pressjitsu customer you likely noticed that we drastically changed the design and layout of the control panel. The main navigation has moved to the left, which makes it easier to scan, especially on a mobile device, and especially as we activate more of our newer features (such as the git-deploy workflow, staging servers, etc.) for more users.
We removed the original dashboard stats, which are mostly obsolete now due to the newer graphs available in the Overview section — traffic stats, errors, cache hit-rate, response times, disk and memory usage and more. We’ll continue to iterate on this screen and add other important application metrics.
We realize that some of you miss the Jetpack-powered pageviews data, but don’t fear. We plan on extending the requests graphs beyond the default 24-hour period, which will work regardless of whether you use Jetpack Stats.
The user experience for new users has also been refined, making it even easier to get started with our free 14-day trial.
Multiple Apps
One of the main reasons behind this new design is our ongoing work on supporting multiple applications per account. Some of our customers have two or more servers with Pressjitsu and it’s a pain to have to login under separate accounts to manage them all.
We’ve already laid the groundwork for multi-app support and we’ll be consolidating existing accounts very soon. You’ll be able to easily access all your application servers from within a single account, as well as launch new servers and invite collaborators to your projects on Pressjitsu.
Billing
If you managed more than one Pressjitsu account in the past, you know that billing is a pain, because each account had a different billing cycle and a separate account balance.
This is no longer a problem — all servers are now billed on the same date, mid-month charges are prorated accordingly, and the user’s account balance is now shared between all active applications.
Backups
We continue to make full daily backups of your Pressjitsu server, which you can restore or download from the Backups section at any time. With the updated interface, on-demand backups are now a bit easier to work with.
In the future we’re planing to lift the 3-slot restriction for on-demand snapshots, as well as allow partial backups and partial backup restoration. In the meantime, if you’d like a single plugin, or database table restored from an existing backup, you’re welcome to contact support.
Login
This is the screen we’re most proud of. It uses the CryptoJS library to generate an MD5 hash of your e-mail address and shows your Gravatar as you type:
It’s also worth noting that we’re dropping support for usernames and using e-mail addresses for authentication instead. Existing usernames will be switched to email-only authentication in the near future.
More Changes Ahead
We will continue to push incremental changes and improvements to our Dashboard as well as to our infrastructure and products in general. We appreciate all the feedback we’ve already received, and looking forward to hear your thoughts and comments on our work.
