Snapshot Backup goes 2.0

I seriously hadn’t expected over 1000 downloads in only 9 days of releasing Snapshot Backup. Thank you to every Presser out there giving it a chance – I truly appreciate it 😉

This success puts the pressure on me to get things right and make things better – and this is a heads up that I’m working on just that. Let me give you a rundown of the features that will (hopefully) make the next release:

New Interface

Many of you simply couldn’t find Snapshot Backup under the Dashboard tab so I want to make it more obvious. Backing up your site is an important part, and if you need it it should be obvious where it is. Apart from that I needed a better navigation system for added functionality and more admin pages. So now Snapshot Backup has its own tab at the left hand side.

Custom WordPress Locations

Currently Snapshot Backup only recognises the standard default WP installation. If you have moved your wp-content or wp-includes directories to different places they may not be backed up. Not good! In the new version Snapshot will acknowledge this and zip your content accordingly

Repository Browser

I’m implementing an option that displays all your snapshots in the FTP repository. From here you’ll be able to restore a snapshot (in far away future versions), and you’ll be able to delete the ones you no longer need. That’s the plan at least so bear with me here… my PHP isn’t that amazing, but I do like a challenge.

I also have plans for you to choose if you’d like to use your FTP repo at all or select  your local server as main storage.

Automated Backups

Wouldn’t it be great to take an automatic snapshot once every day? Well guess what: Snapshot Backup 2.0 will address this need! Using the integrated WordPress functions to schedule tasks you can rest assured that at given intervals (daily, weekly, monthly) a snapshot will be created. There’s even an option to receive an email once that’s happened so you know of potential errors.

Automation is a tough task to implement because it means that you could run out of space on either local or FTP server. Which is why you can choose how many snapshots you’d like to keep. Older ones will be deleted automatically. This of course means yet another challenge for me…

Better Code

I literally threw Version 1.x together as a quickie and didn’t much think of maintainability or coding standards. I’m still very much learning PHP and how to make it work within WordPress. If I want to add to this plugin I have to re-write this thing from scratch to make it extendable and future proof.

But I have great help in doing that: Thanks to Professional WordPress Plugin Development by Brad, Ozh and Justin many of my burning questions about “making plugins work” are finally answered. Nothing seems impossible! Seriously, this is THE BOOK every plugin developer has been waiting for.

It’s only out on Kindle at the moment and will be available on your bookshelves on March 19th (in the UK that is).

When will Snapshot Backup v2 be ready?

See that’s the problem… I’m not sure yet. Could be tomorrow, could be next week, could be a little longer. This project is a passionate coding challenge for me and I’m learning all the time (which keeps me interested).

So the honest answer to the “when” question is: when I’m ready to share it with you. Watch that Update bar at the top of your admin screen 😉

Right, back to work.