We love WordPress. We use it as the backbone for many of our clients websites, too. It’s fast, easy and frequently updated, and comes with a vast amount of training material thanks to the its very large adoption rate.
With the number of WordPress installations installed by us increasing every month, we needed a good solution for keeping track of them all. Prelovac‘s rather fantastic ManageWP solution does this perfectly.
ManageWP (available at ManageWP.com, currently free during beta) is a system, itself powered by wordpress, which keeps track of all your installed WordPress installations and gives you an overview of their status.
As you can see from the screenshot above, the dashboard gives you the perfect overview of everything you could need for your WordPress installs, including the number of posts, comments, hits (with comparison) and much more importantly, the number of updates available.
We make sure our clients are aware that once installed and signed off, their website is their responsibility to update, but ManageWP gives us the ability to 1-click upgrade all available updates.
Obviously, you need to be a little bit careful with what is updated to ensure you maintain backwards compatibility with any theme customisations and such, but even if you don’t, ManageWP’s backup utility lets you schedule automated backups of all your sites, either to the local machine the site is running on, an FTP server, Dropbox, or our favourite, Amazon S3.
You define all the details about backups, and when they should run, and they’ll happen automagically. (Though, we wish they’d let us store more than 10 days of backups!)
You can also easily clone or migrate sites. Say you want to move the blog to a different server – a few simple option boxes allows you to tell it where to copy everything to and it handles all the complicated migrations of files, updates URLs, etc.
There are many other things too which I won’t cover here, things like sub-users, adding posts to multiple sites and installing new plugins and themes, and it’s all powered by a plugin that you need to install on each site you want to manage – it’ll then keep that plugin up to date for you too!
ManageWP.com is currently free while in beta and they expect to charge a minimal fee in the coming months – we’ll certainly be subscribing!
