What’s New With Kernl – March 2018

Welcome to March everyone! Lots of great stuff happened with Kernl this month, so lets get into it.

Features

  • New Marketing Site – The new marketing website for Kernl launched! For most of Kernl’s life the marketing page has been a single landing page optimized for only plugin and theme updates. Since inception Kernl has grown to include a lot more than just updates and the new marketing site reflects that.
  • PHP Version and Install Language Analytics – Kernl Analytics can now track what PHP version your customers have installed as well as the written language of the site. Knowing this information can help you make smart data-driven decisions about internationalization and which programming language features you can target.
  • Plugin & Theme Dashboard Views – Previously when you went to the “versions” page in Kernl you were greeted with just a list of versions for the plugin/theme. Now you can easily see downloads stats, licenses, versions, and Git deployments in one easy screen.
  • Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificates – Kernl switched over to using Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates.

Bugs Fixes & Other

  • The /latest-version endpoint now includes the version id.
  • Build emails were not displaying the correct repository. This has been resolved.
  • Digital Ocean has been doing scheduled hard reboots of servers to handle Meltdown/Spectre issues. We’ve had to carefully manage this process but it looks like we made it through mostly unscathed.
  • There is now a simple proof-of-concept realtime channel on the marketing home page that updates the download count. Eventually we hope to use realtime with feature flags and any other number of things.