Following feedback from customers, we’re pleased to make media imports even easier on the VIP Platform. We have now removed all limits for what file types can be imported using our VIP-CLI tool.
Previously our import tool matched the default limitations in WordPress, allowing the import of files as long as they matched a list of allowed file types. Uploading disallowed file types prior to this update required contacting support. After consultation on the security implications, we are happy to remove this restriction allowing any file of any type to be imported using the vip import media command provided by our CLI.
No updates to the VIP CLI are necessary for you to benefit from this improvement. We’re always pleased to receive feedback from customers and improve our product to make your work easier. Our documentation on media imports contains more details, and please reach out to us if you have any questions!
We’re excited to introduce another new access control feature in the VIP Dashboard. You can now block requests based on the user agent, adding an additional layer of protection for your application powered by the VIP CDN.
What’s New?
This feature allows you to block requests from specific user agents, such as AI crawlers and unwanted bots, before they even reach your application. With better control of the traffic accessing your site, you can ensure that unwanted traffic doesn’t impact your app’s performance.
Rules for managing User Agent blocks can be managed in the VIP Dashboard, from the User Agents page, located under the Security Controls section of the VIP Dashboard. Requests can be blocked based on exact or partial matches of user agent strings.
Why This Matters
Edge-Based Denial: Requests are blocked at the VIP CDN, reducing application load and ensuring faster response times for legitimate users.
No Deployments Required: Easily enable and manage this feature directly from the VIP Dashboard — no code changes or deployments needed.
Granular Control: Set rules to block full or partial user-agent strings for better control over your traffic.
Independent of IP Restrictions: Use this feature alone or combine it with IP address restrictions for enhanced security.
If you’re currently using the VIP_Request_Block class in your application code to manage user agent blocks, we’ve created a guide to help you transition to this new, easier method of restricting access.
We’re excited to introduce Your Year in Content, a year-end report that provides a high-level view of your site’s content performance over the past calendar year.
What’s included
This report compiles key metrics at the site level, helping you assess your content strategy and impact:
Total performance metrics – Yearly page views and visitor counts tallied in one place.
Top content analysis – Your top 5 posts, most engaging sections, and highest-impact authors.
Key content insights – Additional data to give you a full picture of your year’s performance, such as your top-tweeted post or top search-driven post.
Why it matters
Inform strategy – Use past performance to guide future content decisions.
Team recognition – Highlight top-performing content and contributors.
Annual planning – Leverage insights to set data-driven goals for the year ahead.
How to access your report
Your Year in Content report is available now! To view it, replace {{SITEID}} with your site’s ID, such as wpvip.com in the below URL.
After listening to your feedback, we’re excited to share an update that makes exporting media backups, a more seamless experience and gives you greater control over your data!
Previously, requesting media backups from the VIP Dashboard had limitations on the total size and file count of the application. We’ve now engineered a solution to these restrictions, which means that you can request backups of any size directly from the VIP Dashboard.
What’s changed?
Prior to this change, you could generate a backup for a VIP application environment’s media library only if it was less than or equal to 3TB in size. It also had to have fewer than or equal to 2.5 million files.
Media backups can now contain one or more ZIP files with the file extension *.zip. Each zip file can hold up to 3TB of data and up to 2.5 million files.
When generating a backup for environments’ media libraries that exceed these numbers, we split the backup into multiple files, which can all be viewed and downloaded from the VIP Dashboard.
For more details, please refer to the documentation. Reach out to us if you have any questions!
We’re pleased to announce the launch of the custom report capabilityin Parse.ly, an enhancement to the report generation process that gives you greater flexibility and control over your data. This feature allows you to preview and customize your data before generating your final report.
Why this matters
Modern content teams need adaptable reporting tools to make informed decisions. With the new report generation tool, you can:
Personalize report structures by customizing the layout.
Edit or rearrange sections and metrics to match your needs.
Preview data before finalizing your report, ensuring accuracy.
This feature is particularly valuable for teams that rely on tailored insights, allowing them to generate reports that align with their specific reporting needs.
Which reports can I customize?
The first phase of this release makes the new report available within the Details Report. Future updates will extend this capability to additional pre-built reports. No special setup is required to start using this capability.
You can learn more about the custom report capability here. If you have any questions, send us an email at [email protected]—we’re happy to assist!
We’ve made an important update to our mydumper database export functionality: you can now generate partial exports instead of having to export an entire database.
This enhancement gives you more control over your data, allowing you to export only the tables or datasets you need. Whether you’re troubleshooting, migrating specific content, or analyzing a subset of your data, partial exports provide a more efficient and flexible solution.
This update builds on our commitment to enhanced reliability for complex database exports, making it easier to work with large datasets while ensuring performance and stability.
Check out the details in our original announcement here.
Debugging is a critical skill for any software developer. We understand how important it is to quickly find and fix issues, reducing downtime and ensuring users have a seamless experience on your site. For your organization, this means saving time, avoiding unnecessary costs, and having the flexibility to grow and adapt without worrying about technical hiccups.
What is VIP Learn?
VIP Learn is a free instructional platform for engineers with intermediate or higher experience levels looking to advance their skills in enterprise-level WordPress development.
Our aim is to uniquely contribute to your learning journey, providing you with the tools and knowledge needed to excel in your projects and leverage the full potential of enterprise WordPress.
What can I expect from this course?
In this course, we’ll teach you our secrets to expertly solve vexing application issues through established processes and best practices. We’ll walk you through:
How to develop a debugging mindset.
How to develop a personal approach to debugging.
The 9 Golden Rules of Debugging.
Choosing tools and a local development environment.
Tricks to debugging in Local and Remote environments.
Different WordPress application debugging scenarios.
How to write custom debugging code.
Debugging WordPress database issues.
Case studies showing how real WordPress issues were debugged by our team.
Advanced WordPress Debugging is packaged into specific topics that can be completed at your own pace. We’ve made personal developer notes available on each topic page, so you can add your own personal touch to your learning journey.
Course Prerequisites
A familiarity with WordPress development.
A general understanding of basic debugging techniques (ie. the process of identifying and fixing errors or bugs in software applications).
Course Outcomes
After completing this Advanced WordPress Debugging course, you will:
Understand how to approach debugging methodically.
Have an awareness of some of the more complex techniques and approaches to debugging.
Understand WordPress applications at a deeper level.
Understand the tools and techniques used for troubleshooting various WordPress issues.
Be familiar with effective debugging concepts and approaches.
Understand the importance and use of tools like Query Monitor and Xdebug.
How to get started
Engineers can work through course material at their own pace by creating a free account at learn.wpvip.com and directly enrolling in Advanced Debugging.
Please look forward to additional courses coming this year.
We’re excited to introduce a powerful new capability for VIP customers: IP-Based Request Denial on the VIP Platform. This feature gives you direct control over who is blocked from accessing your application right in the VIP Dashboard without requiring a new code deployment.
What’s New?
With this update, you can now deny access directly at the VIP Edge level, improving your access restriction management speed and efficiency. By blocking unwanted requests earlier in the workflow, this feature enhances security and reduces manual code deployments to deny certain IPs.
In addition, we’ve made several updates to the IP Restrictions interface:
Add Notes to IP Restrictions: You can now include descriptive notes to track why specific IPs or ranges are denied or allowed, improving clarity for team collaboration and long-term management.
Updated Design: A refreshed, more intuitive interface makes managing IP restrictions easier than ever.
Checkout our documentation for more details on the new capabilities.
Why This Matters
Enhanced Security: Prevent unauthorized access before it reaches your application, ensuring a safer experience for your users.
Operational Efficiency: You can implement changes on the fly, without waiting for a code deployment or restarting workflows.
Improved Usability: The updated interface allows you to add notes and manage restrictions, helping your team stay organized and aligned.
This feature is available now! Explore the IP Restrictions in your VIP dashboard in the Access & Routing section to streamline access control for your application. As always, we’re here to support you and empower your security, one feature at a time. Let’s make access management smarter and easier!
We’re thrilled to announce a powerful new addition to the VIP dashboard: CSV Exports. This feature, rolling out as part of the Insights and Metrics panel, enables customers to seamlessly download graph data in CSV format for use in external tools and workflows.
Why CSV Exports?
Modern, data-driven teams need flexibility when analyzing performance metrics. Whether you’re tracking updates, deployments, or other key events, CSV Exports provide:
Flexibility: Easily integrate your application data into your workflows and systems for reporting, trend analysis, or custom visualizations.
Accessibility: Simplify data sharing across teams, enabling informed decision-making for complex operations.
This feature is particularly valuable for enterprise customers managing data workflows, offering greater control over how you use your performance metrics.
What’s Included in Phase 1?
The first phase focuses on exporting the data behind graphs in the Insights and Metrics panel. Key events like deployments, updates, and other performance metrics are now available for download. With this release, your access to metrics is always just a click away.
Looking Ahead
We’re committed to providing actionable, exportable data and are excited to enhance this rollout in the coming months. Your feedback will guide us as we expand and refine export functionality to meet your evolving needs.We’re excited to see how you’ll leverage this feature to enhance your workflows and empower your teams.
For more details, please refer to the documentation. Reach out to us if you have any questions!
We are thrilled to present a new Insights & Metrics feature: Anomaly Detection. Anomaly detection is designed to safeguard the performance and stability of the mission-critical applications you host at WordPress VIP. This feature is available to customers on our Enhanced, Signature, and Premier packages. Here’s a brief introductory video.
WordPress VIP’s automated anomaly detection continuously monitors your application, allowing you to focus on other priorities.
Anomalies are detected for four metrics:
Origin 5xx errors – a strong indicator that an application or the server it’s running on is in trouble and requires intervention.
Edge 429 errors – indicates our platform is responding to a sudden increase in suspect traffic such as a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. No immediate action is required from you.
MySQL slow queries – identifying slow queries and optimizing their performance can improve database efficiency and the overall responsiveness of an application.
Object cache hit rate –a drop in cache hit rate often occurs after a code deployment that includes modifications to object cache logic.
You can read more about each type of anomaly and how to respond in the documentation.
Anomaly Detection also provides proactive identification and notification of abnormal events. These notifications are new event types in VIP Notifications, which means you can receive alerts for anomalies with your existing Destinations.
Why is this in “beta”
As a beta launch, we want to clarify that the algorithms powering this feature might see improvements throughout the rest of 2024. We highly value your thoughts and eagerly look forward to incorporating your feedback.
To share your experiences with Anomaly Detection, just click the “Give feedback” button on the top right of any Insights & Metrics page.
Why don’t I see any anomalies?
This is a good thing! We only show anomalies when one of the four metrics above moves in the wrong direction. If your site is operating without anomalies, that’s an indication of application health.
It could also be that your package does not include anomaly detection. This feature is available to customers on our Enhanced, Signature, and Premier packages, customers.
If I see an anomaly, does that mean my site is down?
Not necessarily. You can read more about what each anomaly means the documentation, but as an overview:
Edge 429 anomalies indicate that the WordPress VIP platform has automatically responded to keep your site up.
A MySQL slow query anomaly can identify issues with a specific query, even when accessed infrequently. Correct that issue will keep your site performant if new traffic patterns increase the occurrence of that query.
Dips in object cache hit rate are not uncommon after a deployment or plugin activation, but consistent issues should be investigated as described in the documentation.
Origin 5xx responses are an indication of application health that does require attention. Some of these situations may self-correct, but you should do further research, as detailed in the documentation, to fix the underlying application issues.
Thankyou!
Last but not least, I want to thank the customers who participated in our closed beta of this feature. What we are releasing today is better because of their feedback. Thank you!
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