There are a lot of changes in this version, and for a full change log check out the plugin changelog page. And if you don’t have the license for Pro version already, check out the bottom of the post for 20% discount coupon.

Important: New backup system is tested, but I expect some bugs to be found due to wide range of changes, so please report any problems you find, and include version of WordPress, use of network (multi site) mode and what you tried to do exactly. With so many changes in a single version, bugs are unavoidable. But, I will fix them as soon as possible.

Improvements

Plugins dashboard widget has a new element displayed: Google Page Rank. It will be refreshed every week, since Google is not updating public values of Page Rank that often. Great deal of code is optimized and cleaned, old and unused code removed, some functions merged. All forms for all plugin panels are now secured using nonce protection. Maintenance mode is moved to separate class and improved with new fixes and filters for exceptions to the mode.

Old user levels used for displaying panels are replaced with capabilities, and defaults are added to administrator roles. There are options to control what is available to which user role. Because of that, a lot of old level selecting settings are removed, so check Access tab on the Settings panel.

Global settings got new panel called Multisite. Currently there is only one options: prevent access to wp-signup.php, and redirect to home page. This is useful if you want to prevent creation of new blogs and prevent this file being loaded at all.

Backup Panel

Database panel is now split into two panels. One is still called Database and it can be used to review the database tables and database tools, including mySQL settings. Backup is now moved to a new panel called Backup. New backup will have only database backup moved, but with 4.0 you will be able to backup whole website (all or selected files and folders). New backup files will be created as zip archives, so your server needs to have zlib extension for PHP enabled. Backup will be able to move files to CDN also. First CDN that is supported with this version is RackspaceCloud.

New database backup panel with several backup tasks

Backup allows you to create single backup with multiple tasks, and it works with normal WordPress installation and Multi site. Depending on the mode, administrator can backup whole website, individual blogs, only shared network tables or tables you select. Options you see depend on user role.

Before 4.0 is released, CDN services Amazon S3 and VPS.NET will be supported also, and other CDN’s will follow. In the next few minor versions log files for backup files will be added with all details about the process. Email confirmation emails will be improved also. New jobs tab will have a list of all cron jobs with backups. There are more ideas for all this, but it will take some time to do it all.

Future Versions

Next major version will drop support for WordPress 2.8. That will most likely be GD Press Tools 4.0. According to WordPress.org number of WP 2.8 installations is going down, and it’s getting difficult to support it. So, I recommend that you upgrade to newer version of WordPress. GD Press Tools 2.6 Lite will be released sometime next week.

Promo coupon

Starting now, and until the end of September, a coupon is available that will give you 20% discount. Coupon can be used with GD Press Tools and Dev4Press Bundle purchases. This coupon is: GDPT38PRO.

For a Weblog post and all the comments (including several I made) check out their post:

Trend for 210 – Paying for plugins: http://dv4p.com/hc

So, why should you pay for plugins? Or themes for that matter? For years most of the plugins (with very, very few exceptions) for WordPress were available for free. The same goes for themes, but about year and a half ago that changed, and several designers and developers decided to release so called premium themes and change for them. And during this year they modified their business model to include the GPL for the themes and practically shift focus to support for the themes. And from what I can see, that concept works great and more and more themes are in fact premium themes. And they are, no doubt about it, much, much better from the most free themes (with very few exceptions). Key word in all that is again support, and free themes are basically provided without any support at all (again with very few exceptions).

And, for the past year I use only premium themes, mostly from Woothemes or ElegenatThemes, and this site is made on the base of The Station theme from Woothemes. I don’t mind paying for quality, for fast support, after all all that takes time, and in the end that is not free.

In the past several months we have witnessed the same thing starting with plugins, with few developers started charging for their plugins. With launch of the WPPlugins website we got first payed plugins market. I am not going to talk much about WPPlugins website, but there are many things that are wrong with the way they work and is actually against my idea of how premium plugins should be provided to the end users.

Main reason I decided to start this new Dev4Press and launch several premium plugins is the fact that providing quality support for plugins takes a lot of time, and in the end I don’t have so much free time aside the freelance projects I work on.  It all started with GD Star Rating, and I really tried to provide as much help as I could with tutorials, documentation forums, and after all that users wanted more. So i tried to help on the individual basis by taking on some minor integration projects. And that was successful, but still idea is to have support that can be widely used. And after a while, I made several more plugins I provided for free, and they also have grown and again support became a problem.

So, I decided to stop with free support. If I can’t provided quality free support, than I will not do it, simple as that. And I expanded some of my plugins with additional features that will available only with Pro versions, even written one new plugin (Pro only), and I plan to dedicate most of my time to making WordPress plugins and provide the best quality support I can. Also, all plugins are available with few different packages that have different prices allowing users to find what is best for them.

And why the payed, or premium support is better solution? Imagine that you are building a site for a client (and you are payed to do it), and you are using a free plugin with free (and very limited) support. And, at one point, this plugin breaks down (no regular updated, or bug fixes). Your whole website is not in problems. You can try to replace it or fix it yourself, but that is not usually that easy. Best way is to contact author of the plugin and ask for support. In most cases even if you get response from the author, it will take maybe even weeks. And what you are going to say to your client: hey, this plugin broke, and I need to wait for the support, so we need to delay website for few weeks. Hell no! You will try to find someone to fix it as soon as possible, and you will pay a lot for that. It would be much cheaper if the plugin has premium support.

Just for fun, contact authors of each of the plugins you are using on your blocks (maybe 30 of them). I am sure than at least half of them will not respond at all. A third will respond after a week or two, and maybe 4-5 will respond sooner. But almost no one will be able to help you exactly when you need help. And that’s why is good to have premium plugins around, and give users a choice to pay for the quality. And labeling pluign as premium doesn’t mean that support will be any better, and that’s something all developers need to work on, to raise the quality and to justify the payments and really help their clients.

What you will get from Dev4Press if you decide to buy our plugins (and soon themese)? Regular updates, nightly builds and quick bug fixing releases, premium support forum, email support (development subscriptions), tutorials (both text and video) and extensive documentation. And on top of that, you will be able to influence the development using suggestions box and follow regularly updated roadmaps for all plugins. And be sure that I will release at least 3 new plugins in 2010, and two of them are already in the planning stages.

So, to summarize, paying for quality support is something that will definitively happen, and next year will be critical for this new business model for our beloved WordPress. Tell me what you think.

But, before you go on, here is the reminder of previous posts:

• Test environment setup [ read more ]
• Results from administration tests [ read more ]
• Results from testing blog pages [ read more ]

Administration memory usage

Administration

First batch of tests will focus on WP administration pages. I used the same setup for these tests, and comparison between two versions of WP are on this first chart. As you can see, dashboard page now uses some 5MB less memory in both clean version and with all plugins active. Main reason for this is because feeds are now loading data through AJAX only if they are needed.

Pages are now prepared by PHP much faster, and this is noticeable on, more or less, all administration pages. Generated pages sizes are mostly the same size as with WP 2.8, with few exceptions where the generated page is much smaller, like with the dashboard, because feeds are now not a part of the page. Same speedup is visible on general settings page, and now time zone settings are loading very fast.

As you can see not all pages show memory decreasing, but that is to be expected, not all parts of WP 2.8 were problem, only some of the pages needed to be fixed. But as I said, many of the improvements are visible all over the administration. For the past few days I have been using 2.8.1 on my blogs, and I am very pleased with latest changes.

It’s important to mention, that this time I had no problems with auto upgrade as I had with updating from 2.7.1 to 2.8, so that’s also a big plus for 2.8.1

Blog Pages

The other part of the test is testing of actual blog pages. Again, many things depend on the theme you use and on the loading optimizations theme might (or not) use. As I said before, very few themes right now are improved in that direction. So, I decided for this WP 2.8 against WP 2.8.1 tests to focus on default theme and number of queries executed.

Number of queries on blog pages

As for the other tests like size of the page and used memory, there is almost no difference between two versions. But, as I said in first post on the subject, WP 2.8 is already excellent as the blog pages goes.

But in most cases, WP 2.8.1 needs less queries then WP 2.8. I am not sure exactly what is done to cause this improvement, and I really don’t care, as long as WP 2.8.1 is better. And less queries it takes, means that less resources will WP use, and server will be able to serve content to more visitors in the same time.

Last week I have published similar tests for WP 2.8 and my GD Star Rating plugin, and you can see in that post how much SQL queries will that plugin add to the blog. Tests are done to show the value of cache and prefetch methods I developed into the plugin to minimize the queries.

Conclusion

Now that we have WP 2.8.1 released, there is no more reasons for you to wait with upgrading your blog(s). WP 2.8.x uses more resources then previous versions, but that is, in my opinion, good trade off for much better interface, much easier to use panels for posts and comments, better dashboard, better user interaction and most important faster blog pages that your visitors see. If WP 2.8 was problematic in terms of using too much memory, WP 2.8.1 solved all that problems and even improved in some areas. Overall, this is the best release of WP yet, and a good sign that next versions will be, as expected, even better.

I hope that I will be able to complete (soon) testing of JavaScript performance and testing of some of the plugins to complete the series of benchmark posts trying to give you a better look at WP performance.