At WordPress VIP, we have an ongoing commitment to be the world’s most secure WordPress platform. As part of that commitment, we are pleased to announce secure domain verification. From February 27, 2024, a verification step will be required for all domains added to our platform. Any domains previously added to our platform (legacy domains) are already considered verified, and will not require this step.
To verify a domain you must add a specific TXT record to the domain’s DNS record. The WordPress VIP platform will check for the correct TXT record and update the verification status. Our Domain Verification tool will guide you through the process, and can be found in the VIP Dashboard Domains & TLS panel. You can view the verification status of each domain in the “Verification” column.
Until a new domain has been verified, you will not be able to use it on our platform. Unverified domains cannot receive traffic, provision Let’s Encrypt certificates, be used in our launch tooling, or be used to send emails.
With our Single Sign-On (SSO) feature, your team will authenticate into the VIP Dashboard and VIP-CLI with the same authentication flow used throughout your organization’s tools and services. Our SSO integration is compatible with any federated authentication Identity Provider (IdP) that supports the SAML 2.0 standard, including Okta, Azure Active Directory, and Google Workspace. Taking advantage of this new feature will streamline access management, strengthen governance, and ease your onboarding and offboarding processes.
Here’s what’s new:
Navigation made easier: As part of our improvements to the navigation menu, the Organization menu has also been updated to mirror the streamlined navigation of our Application pages, offering a more intuitive navigation menu structure.
View your SSO configuration: Our new Single Sign-On Configuration page lets you view and manage your SSO setup easily.
Configure your IdP: We’ve simplified the configuration process into a simple tool with four tabs to help you navigate the process:
Identity Provider Data: All the details you need to set up your IdP, easily copy/pastable or exportable for your convenience.
Service Provider Configuration: A streamlined form to enter your IdP details for a smooth setup experience.
Email Domains: Manage the email domains that identify your organization’s users.
Status: Keep track of your SSO setup progress and current status at a glance.
Enforce SSO: For customers looking to establish more secure authentication protocols, the “Enforce SSO” feature requires users of the organization to exclusively authenticate through SSO and disallows access to this organization for users who have authenticated via GitHub or WordPress.com. Enabling Enforce SSO will automatically disable the Invitation flow for the organization and any pending invitations will automatically expire.
User Role Migration Tool: With the new “Copy User Role” feature, Organization Admins can seamlessly transfer user roles from social login users to new SSO users.
Enhanced Dashboard Access Management: We’ve upgraded the Organization “People – Platform Access” page with additional user information columns, filters, and clearer access status indicators to simplify user management and permission migrations. Filter users by their authentication method to gain more visibility into how users access the VIP Dashboard or to easily identify users that need their user roles migrated when Enforce SSO is enabled.
Debugging Support: Clear explanatory error messages during the SSO authentication flow and detailed documentation.
The left-hand navigation menu in the VIP Dashboard is getting a fresh update to make it easier for you to find features intuitively and navigate the VIP Dashboard.
On Tuesday, September 12, 2023, we’ll be rolling out the updated menu, which now has expandable parent categories with child menu options housed within. Each submenu item was thoughtfully placed within its relevant parent category to create a menu structure that’s more intuitive and user-friendly. The parent categories replace the existing hub pages that we had, including the “Data” and “Settings” pages, making it simpler for you to find the tools you need directly from the navigation menu.
We will automatically reroute you to the correct pages in case you have any feature pages bookmarked under the old navigation structure. Hub pages will also remain active in case of reference, but they will be deprecated in the near future.
We’ve updated the Help Center in the WordPress VIP Dashboard to help you onboard quicker, navigate the Dashboard more efficiently, and prepare your sites for launch with confidence. We designed this update to help remove bottlenecks from your workflow by consolidating more information directly in the WordPress VIP Dashboard, enabling a frictionless path to the tools you need.
The Help Center now includes three tabs: Resources, Support, and Prepare to Launch. Each tab is linkable for you to share with your team or bookmark for future reference.
Resources: Search our documentation, get oriented with our platform, keep up with VIP news, and provide feedback for our products.
Support: See how you can reach out for assistance.
Prepare to Launch: Review the recommended steps to get your site ready for launch.
Click on the “Help Center” button in the upper right corner by your user profile icon to access the Help Center.
Users who have access to more than one organization will now be able to view a list of all their organizations in a centralized place in the “My Organizations” panel. This optimizes navigation for more context and orientation in a single view.
Click on the “My Organizations” tab in the top black header to view the panel. For more information, please refer to our documentation.
User Settings Sidebar
User Settings sidebar in the VIP Dashboard
For quick access to your user and various settings, a simplified version of the “Settings” panel will be displayed on the left-hand side of the “My Applications”, “My Organizations”, and “Settings” panels.
Updated Network Sites Launch Tool in the VIP Dashboard
DNS preflight checks in the Network Sites Launch Tool
To streamline your launch experience, we’ve updated the Network Sites launch tool (formerly called the “multisite launch wizard”) with additional enhancements including:
An updated DNS step that includes preflight checks to ensure that the DNS record for your domain is reachable and pointing to WordPress VIP
A new TLS certificate step that shows certificate-specific preflights checks, along with an option to provision a Let’s Encrypt certificate
An updated final step to mark the network site as not launched
An automatic sync to Jetpack once you’ve updated your site to allow for a seamless update of your Jetpack Cache Site
As announced previously, we will be deprecating the launch tool from the Domains panel in the VIP Dashboard. For more instructions on how to launch sites through our Network Sites launch tool in the Network Sites panel, please refer to our documentation.
As part of our journey to make it easier to launch and manage network sites on your WordPress multisite application, we’re introducing a new “Launch Status” column to the Network Sites panel of the VIP Dashboard.
New “Launch Status” column in the Network Sites panelFilter your network sites based on their launch status
Each individual network site within a WordPress multisite will now have its own launch status, rather than a single launch status for the entire environment. This allows you to manage and keep track of your network sites more granularly for increased insight and visibility.
In order to track your overall launches, you can utilize the launch status filter to filter network sites based on launch status.
Network Sites Launch Tool
Previously, network sites could be launched from the Domains panel. To provide a seamless launch experience, we’ve moved the launch capability to the Network Sites panel. Click on the “Launch this site” button to launch a site using the Network Sites launch tool; for sites that have already been launched, click on the “Update domain” link to relaunch the site with a new domain.
If the main site (ID 1) of your multisite is unlaunched, you can click on the “Launch the main site” button in the left-hand navigation bar to conveniently launch your multisite at any time.
To give you even more control over launches, the Network Sites launch tool now allows you to:
Launch subdirectory network sites
Resume a launch that was in progress
Go back to a previous step as needed
Check the DNS and TLS certificate status within the wizard
Mark your site as launched
Subdirectory launches in the Network Site launch wizard
The Network Sites launch tool now supports launching subdirectory network sites. Select the “Subdirectory” option in the first step of the wizard to enter the path of your URL.
If you need to pause the launch after updating your site to wait for the DNS to resolve, you can leave the launch wizard and resume the launch at a later time. Click on the “Continue with launch” button from the Network Sites page to resume the launch. To navigate back to a certain step of the launch wizard, click on the “Change” option for the intended step.
Go back to a previous step via the “Change” optionDNS and TLS certificate checks within the wizard
DNS and TLS certificate statuses are now displayed inline within the wizard to help facilitate a smooth launch process. The DNS status indicates if the domain is pointing to VIP, and the TLS certificate status lets you know if a Let’s Encrypt or custom certificate is installed for the domain.
In the final step of the launch wizard, mark your network site as launched to activate monitoring and alerting services for your site. This will also let VIP know that the site is receiving public traffic.
For more instructions on how to launch sites through our Network Sites launch tool, please refer to our documentation.
Over the coming months we will be releasing a series of new capabilities to make it easier to launch and manage complex sites, determine and execute all required steps, identify and mitigate errors, and have full confidence everything works flawlessly.
As a first step, we are providing deeper visibility into WordPress multisite applications. The new Network Sites page provides insight into your WordPress multisite application, giving you more granular control over your network sites straight from the VIP Dashboard. You can now:
See a list of all the network sites within your multisite.
Search for a specific network site.
Visit a network site’s WP Admin page.
Visit the WordPress Network Admin page for the network site in the context of the multisite network.
Create a new network site directly from the VIP Dashboard.
To view the Network Sites page, click “Network Sites” in the left-hand navigation from a WordPress multisite application.
Application Audit Log
Application Audit Log in the VIP Dashboard
To help you better debug issues with your applications, we are providing easier visibility into each application. While our organization-level Audit Log provides a comprehensive view of events across all your applications within your organization, sometimes it’s helpful to be able to focus on just a single application. You can now follow and track activity for each application with our Application Audit Log in the VIP Dashboard.
To view application Audit Logs, click “Audit Log” in the left-hand navigation bar from a specific application. As previously, to see a comprehensive view of activity across your applications within your organization, click the name of your organization in the breadcrumb header and select “Audit Log” from the left-hand navigation bar.
Audit Log Permalinks
Audit Log Permalinks in the VIP Dashboard
While audit logs are helpful in debugging issues on your own at a moment in time, often you may also want to save a log snippet for later or share these logs, either for a single app or all apps, with colleagues so they can investigate further . To facilitate this, we are also introducing Audit Log Permalinks, a new way to select a specific audit log event to bookmark or share.
Each logged event has a unique and shareable permalink URL linked in the event’s timestamp. When the event’s permalink is selected, the Audit Log is filtered to display that event at the top of the list, and all prior events listed below it.
At any time you can click on the “Go to the most recent events” link to go back to the standard list view.
Improved Accessibility
Navigational changes in the VIP Dashboard
We’ve introduced navigational changes in the VIP Dashboard to adhere to WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards for Section 508 compliance. The application and organization views are now easier to discern with the top black header that persists on each page. Our breadcrumb header also now begins with the organization of an application, allowing easier access to the organization. The environment switcher now sits in the left-hand navigation bar for better visibility.
For easier access to the site, we replaced the Help Center text with the site URL. Also for better visibility, the Help Center toggle now sits in the upper right-hand corner.
As always, if you encounter any issues or challenges, please contact VIP Support.
We’re pleased to announce that you can easily download database backups from the Dashboard.
The backup is provided in a zipped SQL format and can be used to refresh data in local development environments, for ad-hoc data analysis, or any other purpose for which you require a recent and complete copy of your data. You can download backups for either production or non-production environments. Backup download links are unique to each backup copy and expire 15 minutes from generation.
If you need a copy of your database backups on a regular schedule, please refer to our Backup Shipping feature, which transfers the most recent database backup to an S3 bucket under your control either daily or hourly for production environments.
Learn more about Backup Downloads in our documentation.
We’d love to know what you think about this feature; please get in touch!
We have two new features in the VIP Dashboard: a list of your site’s SQL backups accompanied by a straightforward backup shipping tool, along with software versions for your application.
Backup shipping
A list of your site’s database backups
View a list of your site’s database backups in the Data section of the VIP Dashboard, then configure your AWS S3 bucket credentials to retrieve your backups from the S3 bucket of your choice. Backups can be uploaded at an hourly or daily cadence for production sites. Read our documentation for more instructions on how to enable backup shipping.
Configure S3 credentials to enable backup shipping
Software versions
We want you to know which versions of software your applications are running on. You can now see the WordPress and PHP versions for your WordPress applications, and the Node version for your Node applications. Software version information is available in the VIP Dashboard for all Kubernetes sites.
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