Plesk for Russia? Working together

Good afternoon. The inhabitants of the Hosting blog should already be aware of the release of Parallels Plesk Panel 10.4. In the new version, the panel "paid off debts" by the long-promised, but no less interesting features from it. Again, it has become more suitable for the Russian hosting market. Under the cut, I will tell you about the example of “mutual attraction” on the part of REG.RU. The option to register domain names is now included in the built-in billing of “Splash” and can be used by any hoster who installed “Splash” on its servers. In this post - a brief overview of the capabilities of the new control panel and the same brief description of the case about the integration of the module by REG.RU. Yes, and immediately the question: what modules do you lack in similar “boxed” solutions? Not indifferent welcome under cat.



Last November, we released a substantially redesigned 10th version of the Parallels Plesk Panel, and 4 more major updates to it came out within a year. And although some people didn’t like all the changes right away, but now it’s already clear that, in the opinion of users, the new panel turned out to be stable and convenient. The progress of 10.0 was noticed by the authors of a large review on TheHostingNews.com (there are translations on Habré - the first , second and third parts), which highlighted the shift in functionality towards higher sales of hosters. The presence inside the control panel of the built-in billing, as well as free and well-made website builder, was especially emphasized. Thus, according to observers, the developers (that is, we) managed to please a really wide audience - from web studios and resellers of hosting services to fairly large hosting companies that have 1.5 thousand or more clients.
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What's new in Plesk 10.4?

• New “levels of readiness” (Testing, Current, Release, Stable) allow you to consciously choose either the fresher or the more stable versions - for everyone to his taste.
• Postfix was made the default mailer, which is now easier to set up, and can handle more mailboxes (more than 100 thousand mailboxes per server in our tests). Mail leaves the client’s IP address, which reduces the risk of being blacklisted if someone sends spam from the same server that the client’s website is running on.
• Customizable “Simple View” control panel. It is convenient if the panel is used by not-too-technical people (say, VPS for a company without its own admin). Similarly, you can “revoke” features for shared hosting clients.
• Revised licensing policy. Plesk Application Pack and Spam Assassin from the more expensive Plesk Power Pack have moved to a basic license. In exchange for Power Pack, added Kaspersky Antivirus (for 5 mailboxes), UNITY One mobile sites (for 2 domains) and Plesk Manager for Mobile - for monitoring the status and simplest (start / stop) control of panel services from Android, Blackberry, iOS devices .
• Added support for the Microsoft WebMatrix development environment - for the rapid development of sites right from your desktop.
• Added the ability to change PHP user settings and enable / disable Apache modules. PHP settings are transparently applied to mod_php and FastCGI, they keep the customizations that were previously made, they give control to 16 built-in parameters, and any others can be entered with text.
• Updated Parallels WebPresence Builder website builder. Finally, added the ability to create a blog, comment on the page. And in the previous version there was a built-in online store and the ability to publish their sites directly to Facebook.
• The information content and convenience of the hoster interface are significantly enhanced - lists of domain names, an overview of the contents of subscriptions, etc. The built-in search (objects and operations) is available to both the admin and clients.
• Added the feature of archiving files from the panel.

Now - a few more details about the REG.RU plugin. The component was created using the proprietary domain registrar API and SDK for the development of modules for Customer and Business Manager (built-in billing of the hosting panel). This means that any of the hosters who installs Plesk for themselves can also offer their customers the option of purchasing domains, which will be a logical addition to the hosting services.

Developing a plug-in took REG.RU about two months. A brief summary on the results of communication with domain registrar engineers: The SDK for the development of additional modules can already be used, but a number of points are not described in sufficient detail. We were pointed to obvious gaps in the descriptions of the internal interfaces. They will be supplemented and corrected based on the questions received from REG.RU developers.

If you are not very closely following the development of Parallels Plesk Panel, we inform you of a conscious focus on the needs of the Russian market. For example, in the past, Customer and Business Manager besides domain registration REG.RU already has support for invoices (a Russia-specific document), a module for receiving payments AssistID and a domain registrar RU-Center.

Well and, actually, the main thing for which this post was prepared. And what do you miss in the existing panels for complete happiness? What would you add specifically? Opinions would be nice to leave in the comments. And thanks in advance.