Hey WordPress Warriors, below is a quick progress update on what we’re working on and plans for the future.
Table of Contents
Under the Hood
A big chunk of our recent work has been focused on improvements (including lots of bugs squashed) that you won’t see directly in the app.
We’ve been refactoring large parts of our codebase and building out a safe, documentation-driven AI-powered development workflow — this harness allows our team to identify and fix bugs faster than ever, and means we can ship new features more quickly and securely in the future.
Refactoring work is ongoing, and the last 3 weeks have seen many of these changes pushed to production in the form of bug fixes, guards, and stability enhancements.
The end goal of all this groundwork is that our scripts will be much smaller, consume fewer resources, and run much faster, and be more reliable than ever. This secures the foundation for some of the bigger features we’ve been building towards (more on that below).
App Updates
On the more visible side of things, we have a few updates coming to the main app. The UI is getting some useful additions — you’ll soon be able to see things like your PHP version, WordPress version, and server build type directly in the interface, making it easier to keep track of your environment at a glance. It will also have a minor aesthetic update in the near future too.
The planned rollout of support for several add-ons — including updates, teams, relay, fortress, and all server add-ons is still on the way. This update will benefit Core and Pro plan users, giving them the option to pick up features that were previously out of reach.
Under the hood on the app side, we’ve completed a significant upgrade to a new version of Laravel. This was partly to enable support for newer PHP versions, but it also unlocks something we’ve been working towards for a long time — much more granular controls to things like API throttling. This is all working towards our ability to offer tiered API access, with the option for users to add on additional API request capacity as needed.
PanelPress
We won’t pretend this one hasn’t taken longer than any of us would have liked. PanelPress has been a long time coming, and we know that patience wears thin.
The good news is that after another unplanned refactor (out of our control), the work on PanelPress is finally in its pre-release stage. We’re wrapping things up and are looking forward to getting it into your hands very soon. We’ll have more details to share as we get closer to release.
What’s Next?
Short answer: The process manager and an overhaul of the UI.
The two big ones, as we’ve mentioned before, are a full UI overhaul and a process manager — both of which we’re actively building toward. The goal is for the app to be fully API-consumable, including by AI agents, which, combined with a cleaner UI, will make for a significantly better experience all round.
Beyond this and the future release of UpdateSafely, the focus is less on piling on new features and more on refining what we already have — making it work better, perform more reliably, and be easier for our team to maintain and build on. We think that’s the right call, and the foundation we’re putting in place now will make everything that comes after it much stronger. Maintenance itself is an ongoing effort, and all the current refactoring will reduce this workload.
Managed Hosting
We continue to add more and more sites to our managed hosting and help agencies host some of the most demanding, complex WordPress websites in the world. While some of what we’re building will be made available to everyone (when we’re ready to release it), and some is strictly proprietary.
These will not appear on our public roadmap.
We’re solving hosting problems no other host has been able to solve, and we’re done providing the roadmap for other hosting SaaS companies to copy.
Changelog
You can view our changelog here:
https://roadmap.gridpane.com/changelog
The roadmap and changelog will be moved into its new WordPress home in the near future.
Q&A
Are previously planned features still planned?
Yes. All features we’ve announced as planned are still coming.
Is GridPane still alive and well?
Yes, we’re alive and well, and we’re extremely busy behind the scenes. We’re also actively recruiting new team members, our user base is continually growing, and the managed hosting side of our business is expanding.
Why the radio silence?
No excuses, we had planned an update for March, but it got pushed back as I have been a little out of action the past month. We’re still aiming for quarterly updates in the form of a blog post like this.
Why no new knowledge base articles?
The knowledge base already covers our entire platform and far beyond it. It’s by far the largest and most comprehensive knowledge base in all of WordPress hosting (and likely any other type of hosting) by orders of magnitude. It receives updates where needed, and we’re open to requests for new topics you would like to see covered.
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