Cpanel 11 Preview
For the past few years I haven’t seen any huge changes in WHM/Cpanel although they keep putting out new versions of their software. Recently we upgraded a customer to Cpanel 11 and have seen that this version has some significant changes and new features to watch out for.
Right now you have to be running the EDGE release series to get all of these new bells and whistles:
New LAMP stack
Cpanel 11 has a overhauled version of its Apache building tool, easyapache. The newest easyapache lets you choose between Apache 1.3, 2.0, and 2.2. Native support of Apache 2.0 and 2.2 is brand new to Cpanel despite years of the software being available and stable. The latest stack now is:
- Apache 2.2.4
- PHP 5.2.2
- MySQL 5.0.27
Notwithstanding the newer versions, the easyapache tool is much more powerful. You can choose from a huge variety of Apache server modules as well as PHP modules to build.
New x3 theme
The basic x or x2 theme in WHM/Cpanel has always been very basic and functional with a grab bag of spelling and grammatical errors thrown in. Most shared web hosting providers would quickly replace it, thanks to Cpanel’s extensive theme support. The Cpanel team finally did something about it, releasing their new x3 theme with Cpanel 11. To their credit, a lot of the wording has been cleaned up and improved but I know I still spotted one spelling error in just a few minutes of digging around in WHM.
The WHM theme is functionally the same, just cleaned up and spruced up a bit:
The new Cpanel x3 theme is more impressive. When a new user first logs in to their account, they are presented with a “welcome to cpanel” wizard, designed to bring them up to speed on the control panel:
The welcome wizard is a great idea. It offers basic info on how to upload your website, the concept of paths and the public_html folder, etc. It goes through several steps including e-mail account setup and setting up a catch-all. Personally I think the beginning user shouldn’t be offered the option of a catch-all because of the amount of spam it can let in. The wizard also prompts the user to setup ssh keys for password-less authentication. I was scratching my head wondering who thought that should go into the new user setup wizard.
Web disk via WebDAV
Another new feature that is also included in the wizard allows users to easily setup a folder on their desktop computer to drag and drop files to their hosting account. The wizard in cpanel does a pretty good job of explaining this. Cpanel is using WebDAV with SSL support to make this happen.
Links