To start off our latest Shifter changelog, we are announcing a new feature to help users who need emergency access to their WordPress sites.
At the moment, we are labeling this feature, Emergency User. This feature adds a temporary administrator to your WordPress installation by clicking the Emergency User link within the WordPress Dashboard.
This feature is secured behind your Shifter Dashboard account which now also support MFA!
If you get locked out of your WordPress site for any reason, this is a great way to easily and quickly recovery access so you can reset your primary account and log back in.
Please note, this user account is temporary and it’s not intended to be used as a primary user. Check out our support docs for more info on how to use this release.
Extended Sitemap Support for Yoast
WordPress sites on Shifter now inherently support sitemaps from providers like Yoast. Prior to this release, support for sitemaps was limited to providers who added paths to their sitemaps index files in the Robots.txt file.
By default, Yoast does not include paths to the sitemap index it creates. According to their documentation, this is a feature which focuses on performance considering sitemaps can contain hundreds if not thousands of entries created on each pageview.
We agree this could have an impact on performance when running sites on traditional hosting environments but that’s not the case on Shifter.
Our generator will now add paths to Yoast sitemap indexes without any additional plugins or settings and when your site is statically generated it won’t need to generate those posts on each pageview. They will already be available and cached by our CDN.
We’ve accomplished this feature through a new mu-plugin which is automatically added to each Shifter site. You don’t have to update or modify your site at all. If you are using Yoast with sitemap support enabled, this will simply work!
Dashboard Artifact Pagination
While editing and updating your sites on Shifter creating new Artifacts can quickly add up. To make it easier to manage we are introducing pagination for Artifacts. From within the Shifter Dashboard, Artifacts will begin to paginate after 20 builds.
Bulk Deletion of Artifacts
Along the same idea about managing a larger number of Artifacts, we are introducing features to bulk delete Artifacts. This would be helpful for anyone who doesn’t need or wants a record of older builds.
Domain Validation
During the domain validation process, domains can timeout if they are not validated. Domains which timeout are now automatically removed to tidy up the Dashboard.
Account Management
For Shifter users hosting sites for clients or for their business, we are offing more options to manage your records. You can now download invoices as receipts right from the Shifter Dashboard.
This feature is in addition to the automated email receipts and can be accessed anytime from your Dashboard.