Background
As part of our 2 weeks maintenance release cycle, Prime Mover 1.3.1 is released today. Included in this update are important bug fixes and some usability improvements. Keep reading 😉
Change log
= 1.3.1 =
- Fixed: Overwritten page template during restore.
- Usability: Improve UX on package manager screen for ease of use.
- Fixed: Updated automated tests for ease of maintenance.
Change details
There is a bug fixed regarding overwritten custom page templates (e.g. created by third party plugins like Elementor). The custom page template is overwritten with default template thus the design of the pages that uses these templates were incorrect. The workaround before this fix is tedious, users needs to manually assign templates. Now this is fixed! 🙂
The mechanism of the problem is that during post author adjustments, it uses native WordPress wp_update_post. This function validates page templates used by the post if its correct. However during restore process, all third party plugins are still inactive (only Prime Mover is active), thus the third party custom page templates were not validated correctly by WordPress. As a result, it reverts to default template templates.
The fix added was to restore this template as it was originally exported by the origin site.
The second important change pertains to usability issues on Prime Mover package manager screen. These are notable usability issues that is now fixed with this new version:
- Target blog ID is not indicated or clearly not indicated in the package manager. This results to some confusion of identifying the correct backups to restore. This issue particularly affects multisite restore as target blog ID is used. In single-site , it is also important so user can correctly identify multisite packages with it’s associated blog ID in a ONE glance on the manager screen.
- Package type is emphasized. We upper-cased the package type (e.g. SINGLE-SITE or MULTISITE) so user can easily spot these packages in quick glance.
- Source blog ID is removed in multisite package manager screen as it is redundant. Instead it is replaced with target blog ID which is a more important information to present to users.
The last change pertains to testing automation. It does not directly affect users. This is how it looks now:
What’s next?
There are LOT of things coming but we will roll it out to you one by one. Here are the glimpse of what you can expect in the future changes for Prime Mover for both PRO and FREE users:
- (PRO and FREE) Discourage native browser upload of very large packages. Obviously this results to poor user experience but currently Prime Mover allows this. If you have noticed, you can upload 3GB over a very slow connection! Yeah this takes hours, but not a great thing to do. There is a another way to upload this efficiently (e.g. via cPanel or SFTP) directly to export directory path. This needs to be emphasized for first time users.
- (PRO) Per package decryption – if you have noticed; you need to change the encryption key of the entire site just to have your new package restored that is created with different encryption key from another site. This is confusing and not so user friendly. Instead, per package decryption should be supported. So you don’t need to change the key at all at the target site but only provide the key that is specific to the restored package.
- (PRO and FREE) Allow Prime Mover plugin to be activated in a restricted hosting environment that blocks write access to WordPress root directory. These types of hosts exists, we will try to make Prime Mover more user friendly to these type of hosts.
That’s three on the prioritized TODO lists. Well there are still many, automated backups , Amazon S3 support etc. Just to name a few. 😉 Want to suggest new feature? Do you experience an annoying issue with the plugin? Please contact us. Thanks.