1Pilot is an advanced monitoring and management platform for all your OctoberCMS sites. The service launched with an extended free-trial period in November 2018, when more than 150 users tested the platform with over 500 sites, many of whom have carried on using the full post-launch service.

Our partner inetis sàrl created 1Pilot because their website maintenance commitments to clients took their developers’ focus away from more valuable work. The company owners realised that if the team was less distracted then their clients would receive better, more creative work.

If you’re not familiar with 1Pilot, here’s a very quick rundown of its key features (you can find more details in the previous post):

• See October CMS plugins and themes installed on every website managed with 1Pilot.
• Remotely install/update plugins on your managed websites from a ZIP file, URL or GitHub repository.
• Get critical notifications when a plugin, server software or other key element is altered.
• Uptime monitoring.
• SSL certificate reminders.
• Private plugin updates from Github repositories.
• Server and configuration monitoring for PHP/MySQL versions, or changes in important system configuration files.

Exciting major developments in the 1Pilot system

The team at inetis have been working hard to launch the full 1Pilot service, which went live in February 2019. Since then, inetis has released its first batch of major updates, which bring exciting and useful new tools to the platform as suggested by early-adopters.

A brand-new notifications system

After listening to feedback from users, the 1Pilot crew decided to reimagine their notifications to give users more control over their preferences:

• Get updates on email, Slack or Discord.
• Set emails to ‘immediate’ or round them up with a ‘digest’ at different intervals.
• Customise notification preferences by channel and type of update.

Full details of the changes can be found on 1Pilot's blog.

A comprehensive email verification tool

1Pilot have just released an email checking service to ensure emails are functioning properly. They hope this will provide a useful service for OctoberCMS and Laravel users that is currently missing on the market:

• 1Pilot will validate the status of your emails at regular intervals by sending an email to a preconfigured address
• It checks the SPAM score, SPF & DKIM records
• Then sends tailored alerts if there are problems

Centralized log management for all your sites

The team have also developed a way to maintain central visibility over errors reported by your sites. They now have a central error log that doesn’t compromise site security:

• It gives you an overview of the number of errors reported by your websites in the last 24 hours
• It shows you how many errors have been reported in the last 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days.
• It notifies you when the number of errors reaches a configurable limit.
• It allows you to see each error for each site in detail without storing the data - to maintain security and data privacy.

Full details of the changes can be found here.

An OctoberCMS partner exclusive 1Pilot offer

The team at inetis would like to build stronger relationships with other October CMS partners and so have decided to offer a coupon to extensively trial 1Pilot. Partners can now avail of different coupon amounts according to their status:

• Gold partners - $200 credit.
• Silver partners - $100 credit.
• Bronze partners - $50 credit.

1Pilot pricing starts at $2/site/month, so these coupons offer far-reaching trials. They hope this will encourage other businesses to become an October CMS partner and help build a culture of sharing amongst those closest to October CMS. Needless to say, we think it’s a great idea!

If you haven’t tried 1Pilot for your sites yet, head over to their registration page to make use of their 15 day full-featured trial.

In other news…

1Pilot founders Pierre-André Vullioud (CTO) and David Pizzotti (UI & Design) are busy working with the team to release some other exciting future features, including:

• Logging/displaying site maintenance and config debug statuses directly in 1Pilot.
• Integration with popular backup packages to have the status and the date of the last successful site backup.

Watch the space for future updates to the 1Pilot system.