If you have dozens of servers or sites, our previous dashboard wasn’t a great experience. Lots of paging through servers and sites, no filtering, and no sorting. You pretty much had to use the search feature exclusively because browsing the dashboard was painful.
The new dashboard addresses these issues and more. First, we split servers and sites into their own separate screens and listed them in a table format where you can see a lot of information at a glance.
In both the Servers and Sites screens, you have common features. When the page loads, the focus is on the filter box, so you can just start typing to quickly filter for the servers or sites you want to see.
You can also sort the tables by clicking on the column you’d like to sort by. Clicking the column again will reverse the sort order. Super handy if for example you want to see all the sites sorted by oldest to newest PHP version.
You can also hide and show columns and rearrange their order.
Since the new dashboard surfaces Assistant Todos more prominently, we’ve also recalibrated their priority thresholds to better reflect the urgency of each action item. To reduce the noise, the “Critical” priority will be reserved for sites or servers that are down, or are likely to go down without intervention (eg. running out of disk space). Other items will still rise to the “High” priority to indicate that they should still be addressed promptly for security and to keep things running smoothly.
Although the new dashboard is a huge improvement and exciting on its own, it also opens the door to exciting possibilities like bulk selecting sites and performing actions on them as well as adding tags to servers and sites (e.g. production/staging or client names).
A secondary benefit here is that we’ve taken care of some technical debt. We’ve replaced an older Bootstrap and Vue 2 frontend with a Tailwind, Vue 3, and Inertia frontend. Right now only the dashboard runs on the new stack and the rest of the app is still using the old frontend. As we move forward, we’ll be replacing other parts of the app, keeping the experience as seamless as possible, and speeding up our ability to ship new features and improvements.