A more realistic Roadmap

manu

We are seriously considering a switch over from plesk and cpanel servers and looking forward for using enhance as a primary cp.

What I am observing is the updates and roadmap is not in sync at all. We are yet to get the features promised for February which are:

Cloudflare API integration
Ability to sync DNS record to Cloudflare on a per website basis
v2 LiteSpeed /OpenLiteSpeed config settings
DKIM message signing
Configuration of brute force protection for control panel
UI to allow and block "Login email address" and "IP addresses". Including an automatic 'Temporary block threshold' and 'permanent block threshold' setting for both.
DNS templating;
The ability to create default records which are added to every zone created within the hosting platform.
Move websites between customer;
Functionality that allows a Master organization or Reseller to move websites between customers in their organisation.

While we did get a good update in the mid February, we don't see updates promised yet. While I am aware as a developer myself that it is quite a challenge to achieve things and tech updates, a more realistic roadmap helps us plan our ops accordingly and it will be a win-win.

AdamM

manu That's true. There are delays. Unfortunately the Enhance team is not very big but I know they work very hard.
I can understand that, we have to trust the Enhance team and not criticize.

Adrien

manu I understand your expectations, and I can't wait either, but I hold a different view on Enhance's synchronization with the +1year roadmap. As of the date of your post, Enhance is only 3 days behind schedule on the roadmap they followed super well for the past 8 months.

I think they are making amazing and quick progress, considering how many problems and feature requests they have to deal with. Also, their excellent support behind the scenes might have taken up a lot of their time.

In general, I've decided to stop complaining about roadmap timing and instead ask why and when.

Adam

This is a very fair point @manu, we are behind schedule.

One of the biggest challenges of Enhance compared to a SaaS product is ensuring update safety. We can see from our licence system which versions are still being used in production and our CI needs to ensure that Enhance can be safely updated from every one of those versions without any downtime, whether the customer has 1 server or 100 servers in their cluster.

In this case the delay in releasing 9.1.0 is due to bugs we have found in the cPanel importer in pre-release testing. cPanel backup files are not uniform in their structure and we have found some edge cases with backups generated on different versions of cPanel or with different permutations of addon/parked domains, subdomains, emails, etc.

To manage expectations, 9.1.0 includes the cPanel importer and CloudFlare. It doesn't yet include v2 litespeed. DKIM or DNS templating - these will be in 9.2.0 which will release mid-March.

We are very grateful your patience. Please be assured that it's our utmost priority to release these features as there are a lot of customers waiting on the same thing.

We may also revise the roadmap further if we feel we can't meet the current targets.

Zoinkies

Adam Adam, maybe it would be better if instead of promising features based off dates, they’re promised based on popularity? https://canny.io/ instead of promising dates and batches of features, just develop the top most three features requested by popularity and release them when they’re tested and done. Takes the pressure of the Enhance team to fulfil dates and unrealistic batches of features, and satisfies the community by giving us some power over what the Enhance schedule of development is. I know 99% of us here would prefer LSv2 over Cloudflare, we should be able to vote on that type of thing to prioritise it.

ss88us

Zoinkies Adam, maybe it would be better if instead of promising features based off dates, they’re promised based on popularity? https://canny.io/ instead of promising dates and batches of features, just develop the top most three features requested by popularity and release them when they’re tested and done.

I really like Zoinkies idea of having Canny (or similar) to handle feature requests. Besides the obvious for the community, it should indeed free up time for the Enhance team because we could search for features/request ideas and any matching would pop-up for us to upvote or start a new idea.

manu

@AdamM @Adrien I think my message came across as criticism. That was not the intention. I am a developer myself and I totally understand the delays.

The larger point is missed. the idea is only to have a well maintained roadmap and not wrt to the update delays. For example: The WordPress features (of course much needed) update was great but the roadmap doesn't have a mention of it. The cPanel migration was from December which will get completed now.

All I am saying is a regularly updated Roadmap page. This helps us plan + Even for enhance team its a great way to market.

Adam

The forum is actually quite a small subset of our users. Cloudflare and cPanel imports are 2 of the most widely requested features which is why they were prioritised for this release.

cPanel is also a very important feature for us because it helps customers to scale with Enhance, to bring their customers onboard more easily.

LiteSpeed v2 will be in the 9.2.0 release which is still on target for this month.

DracoBlue

It's a young project. But you're doing great! Plesk implements features much slower. I am waiting for a migration from plesk and I am moving to you.

Powie

DracoBlue

same for us.... we plan to migrate much hostings from plesk to enhance. so fur us plesk import will be the gamechanger.... 🙂

I think, from time to time, topics in the roadmap has to be re prioritized

Adrien

I like what I read here, and hope we'll all be very successful, so we become a main subset of Enhance users ;-)