Hello everyone and welcome to the May 2020 edition of “What’s New with Kernl”! This month was relatively slow for us with little work on new features and more focus on bugs and refactoring. Let’s dive in.
- We now have video tutorials for enabling Git deployments on your WordPress plugins and themes. You can see them on your Kernl dashboard, or in the Kernl documentation.
- License Tab UX – The license tab in the plugin and theme edit interface was getting out of control. We collapsed the provider specific controls into an accordion to make it a little easier to digest.
- Global CDN – Kernl now has the option to serve your updates via a global CDN powered by Vercel. If you have a geographically diverse customer base, this might be for you.
- Analytics Date Selection Bug – There was an issue with date selection being wrong in some cases.
- Mongoose Upgrade – Kernl used Node.js and MongoDB under the covers to deliver your updates. Our ORM is Mongoose and had been stuck on the 4.X version of it for a long time. We finally upgraded to the 5.x series and saw 40% reduction in queries to our database.
- Analytics Database Maintenance – Removed 2 indexes that we didn’t need and dud a full vacuum on the largest and highest traffic table. Recovered 5Gb of hard disk space.
- Kernl Blog Rebuild – Our blog is self-hosted and was running on some pretty ancient hardware/software. We rebuilt the machine to use Ubuntu 20.20 + Nginx & PHP-FPM.
- Analytics Daily Aggregates Failure – For 2 days Kernl analytics daily aggregates were failing due to disk space space and memory issues (see Analytics Database Maintenance). This has been resolved.
- Site Health SSL Certificate Expiration – We forgot to renew the WordPress Site Health SSL Certificate (oops!). This is now an automated process 🙂
That’s all for this month. I hope everyone has a great June!