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What's New in This Release

Plesk 8 offers you the following new features:

Brand-new Desktop interface option - Plesk 8 boasts quick and efficient task-oriented desktop, while retaining the ability to use old, traditional interface, and offering the options of switching between old and new interfaces, and even using both at the same time. Now administrators have quick access to major management functions and they have immediate access to mission critical information and statistics. The task-oriented design also allows administrators to create "favorites" and "shortcuts".

New generation of Backup Utilities - The improved backup/restore utilities based on Plesk Migration Manager engine let administrators backup and restore client accounts, selecting which client's domains to backup/restore and whether the client's information should be backed up/restored. The improved domain restoration brings now a domain to the very state the domain had during the backup. Backup files are no more digitally signed, which lets domain administrators to migrate their domains from server to server by themselves. This generation of Backup Utilities also allows to backup/restore Site Applications and Application Vaults.

Auto-installer V3.0 - This improved feature lets administrators deploy and upgrade multiple servers in an efficient, cost effective manner. The new architecture allows for improved dependencies tracking and increased speed during installation and upgrade. All of this makes the support of new operating systems simpler and easier.

New and improved Acronis True Image Module - Plesk now comes with a new ATIS module. Using this module, administrators can create server disk backup images without interrupting server operations and perform easy and fast recovery of the entire system. The module enables scheduling backup tasks, launching manually backup tasks, selecting the compression level for backup images, setting up passwords to protect backup images, and other useful features.

Watchdog 2.0 - The second generation of Watchdog utilities, Watchdog 2 tremendously improves its predecessor capabilities. In addition to previously available features Watchdog 2 now monitors your hard disks, scans your server for security vulnerabilities such as rootkits, backdoors and local exploits, and displays CPU and RAM usage statistics.

Interface Control Management - This feature introduced in Plesk 7.5.3 enables Plesk administrators to easily and efficiently manage the visibility of the control panel buttons. Plesk administrators have the flexibility to maintain a simpler, cleaner interface for end-users by hiding the controls for features that are not installed from Plesk users. Plesk 8 introduces the concept of client interface templates, which eliminates the need to adjust interface settings on a per-client basis. This can considerably speed up your client interface management.

Domain Aliases support - This new feature lets domain administrators set up alternative domain names which act as nicknames for websites and e-mail addresses, and modify their DNS records.

SSL support for subdomains - This feature provides SSL support for subdomains, enabling you to create and use subdomains that use Secure Sockets Layer protocol for authentication and security.

Wildcard SSL certificate support - By popular demand, in this release you can use SSL certificates with wildcards as domain names (a.k.a. wildcard SSL certificates). This feature also supports the creation of self-signed wildcard SSL certificates and generation of Certificate Signing Requests (CSRs) for wildcard SSL certificates.

Protection of cgi-bin directory - Due to numerous requests, Plesk 8 adds the ability to protect your cgi-bin directory, securing the access to it. You can also create protected directories in cgi-bin directory, increasing the flexibility of your secure content structure. This means that you can now restrict access to your dynamic web pages that use CGI scripts.

MySQL 4.1 support - This release adds full MySQL 4.1 support, eliminating all possible problems with local characters in MySQL databases.

Improved usability of DNS records management - Plesk 8 drastically improves the security and usability of DNS records management, employing dynamic DNS records generation forms. With new simplified DNS management interface and dynamic forms the possibility of making a mistake when managing your DNS records is close to none.

SOA DNS records management - In this version you can manage Start of Authority (SOA) DNS records through Plesk Control Panel. With added support for SOA DNS records management, Plesk offers you more DNS fine-tuning options than ever before.

Multiple Remote Databases support - Plesk 8 allows you to use remote database servers for storing client databases. Moreover, you can easily employ and manage multiple external MySQL and PostgreSQL database servers at once.

Improved databases administration - This release offers extended database administration capabilities and improved PhpMyAdmin and PhpPgAdmin integration. Plesk server administrators now have the full-fledged database administration ability via phpMyAdmin and PhpPgAdmin, being able to create database users, manage their access rights and remove users, if necessary. Improved database administration capabilities now allow you to choose the default user for DB WebAdmin feature.

Simultaneous migration support - Plesk Migration Manager now allows simultaneous (a.k.a. multisession) migrations. This new feature is a definite time-saver, especially for Expand migrations. Simultaneous migration is easy and convenient way to migrate data from several servers at once.

Simplified IP mapping during migration - Simplification of IP mapping in Plesk Migration Manager makes migration even quicker and easier than it was before. All excessive IP mapping is removed, as you only need to map those IPs that are actually used by migration objects.

Site Applications and Application Vaults migration - the ability to migrate Site Applications and Application Vault is a great new functionality for Plesk Migration Manager. This feature is another big step towards perfect migration brought to you by Plesk team.

PostgreSQL databases migration - Plesk Migration Manager now can migrate PostgreSQL databases from one Plesk server to another, further increasing the functionality and flexibility of migration.

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) support - Plesk 8 adds the support of popular and very effective SPF (Sender Policy Framework) spam prevention system. SPF is based on using special DNS records that specify which machines are authorized to transmit e-mail for a specific domain, thus making it easy to distinguish genuine e-mails from those forged by spammers. For more information about Sender Policy Framework system, refer to http://spf.pobox.com/howworks.html.

Pluggable Authentication Modules authentication support - In this release the support for Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) authentication was added. PAM authentication is flexible mechanism for authenticating system users, further improving Plesk server security.

APOP authentication support - In this release encrypted APOP authentication for POP3 protocol is added. Your mailbox passwords will never be transmitted in plain text again - APOP is using MD5 hash, providing quality encryption and secure authentication of transmitted e-mail credentials.

Qmail Queue Management through Control Panel - This feature allows administrators to manage the Qmail message queue directly through Plesk Control Panel. With this feature, you can manually delete spam and other unwanted mail from the queue, using quick and intuitive sorting options.

PHP 4.4.2 upgrade for FreeBSD - FreeBSD versions of Plesk 8 come with PHP upgraded to 4.4.2 version. PHP 4.2.2 offers increased performance and security among other improvements.

Dr.Web 4.33 updated - Dr.Web anti-virus is upgraded to new 4.33 version in Plesk 8. Additionally, brand-new Plesk Autoinstaller V3 can successfully update all Dr.Web components, thus making previous Dr.Web autoupgrade problems obsolete.

SpamAssassin 3 upgrade for FreeBSD - FreeBSD versions of Plesk 8 come with SpamAssassin 3 included. This new SpamAssassin version further improves the quality of spam filtering, while fine-tuning SpamAssassin's already outstanding performance.

Use of mod_jk module instead of mod_webapp module - Plesk 8 now uses mod_jk module instead of outdated mod_webapp module for its Java-related needs.

Improved support of Chroot Shell Environment - Plesk 8 vastly improves disk space usage for Chroot shell environment in vhost. Now disk space usage for chroot shell environment in vhost is minimized, saving your precious free HDD space.

Secure administrator password retrieval - This new feature allows Plesk server administrator to retrieve and change the administrator's password without logging in to Plesk and without compromising the Plesk server security.

Host name validation during install - Plesk 8 now validates the host name during the installation process, checking the compliance of host name with IP address. This eliminates several possible problems during the installation, improving Apache and MySQL operation consistency.

New informative welcome screen - When you log in to Plesk 8 for the first time, a welcome screen with short and to-the-point description of new features will be presented. This will help you familiarize yourself with plethora of new features available in Plesk 8.

Initial configuration improvement - Plesk 8 allows you to configure default IP addresses at the first startup, making the process of initial Plesk configuration quicker and easier.

MD5 authentication in XML RPC - Plesk 8 gives you the option to use MD5 authentication in Plesk XML RPC. This vastly improves Plesk Control Panel security when using Plesk API, enabling you to encrypt the passwords and protect Plesk from potential hacker attacks.

Improved SpamAssassin and Dr.Web API management - With Plesk 8 you can manage SpamAssassin and Dr.Web through Plesk API much more effectively than before, utilizing a wide range of commands and options previously unavailable for API management.

CLI interface utilities update - Beginning with Plesk 8, CLI interface utilities do not use .sh name suffix anymore. We recommend all Plesk 8 users to use the new, more convenient syntax. While the old syntax will be supported for a while, it is outdated and its support will eventually cease.

Brand new context help files and user's guides - we have prepared brand new documentation set to help you satisfy your Web hosting management needs faster and easier. If you cannot find any information you need, or would like us to add more details on specific operations or give explanations of how something works, please let us know by dropping a letter to userdocs@swsoft.com: We want to help you and will try to add the information you need as soon as possible.

Note: Mambo CMS and osCommerce applications have been moved to Application Vault.