Hello fine folks at MainWP. I’ve been a Pro subscriber since 2021 and, while admittedly I don’t spend a lot of time toying with the UI (too busy trying to get work done), I’ve never made any changes to the theme - I still use the default - and I’m sorry to say it has only gotten more convoluted for me over time. I really hate to critique at all, because I find MainWP to be an extremely useful tool and I myself would not be able to program such a beast. I’m sure it’s a big challenge to keep the UI developed to work harmoniously with the backend code, so please don’t get the impression that I think your job is easy. It is clearly a big task and your team really does a good job at trying to keep it all organized. If I could mention one thing in that regard - while some changes will always be necessary and constant, other changes are sometimes less important and sometimes “less is more”. Focusing back on the most important tools for users who manage hundreds of sites, those of us who need to just get in / operate / get out & on with other work seems to be something that a lot of WP related things overall have lost sight of in recent times. A lost art. Personally I’d be happier with less “fat” in an interface, and more clear / more concise ways to handle day-to-day necessities, even if it were simple plain check boxes and buttons. Hopefully that doesn’t come across badly; it’s meant to be constructive feedback on great products like MainWP and many other great tools.
But my main question at this time is - how can I more easily (but safely) clean out over 70,000 entries / over 3,000 pages worth in the Site Changes database, without the painstaking process of dismissing them one at a time?
Even the Settings menu in the upper-right corner looks virtually invisible. How did we arrive at like 50 subsets of menus, but one of the most important buttons being that way? (Maybe it’s just my system displays?).
I’d also like to know if there’s a way to have MainWP realize that having one Inactive theme - a Default WordPress theme such as Twenty TwentyFive - is recommended, and should not be part of the Site Hardening when it’s just one default theme to fall-back on for troubleshooting when necessary.
Of those 162 issues listed in my “Site Hardening” section, 90% of them are just the presence of the latest WP Default theme in addition to (insert your favorite mass-produced master theme here).
Many thanks to the MainWP for an excellent product, and hopefully you can take this feedback / questions as constructive.
Thanks for sharing your feedback and for being with us since 2021! I also appreciate your detailed breakdown.
I’ll reach out to technical support to see if there’s a more efficient way to handle this until we can make it easier in an upcoming update in the next couple of weeks.
As MainWP evolves interface can feel more complex. and I appreciate your feedback about simplifying the UI to focus on essential tools. If you have specific suggestions on what would make it better for your workflow, please share them at voice.mainwp.com, as that’s the best way to help us prioritize improvements.
I appreciate the feedback. That said, the upper-right corner is a fairly standard location for settings in most services, so it should feel intuitive to most users. However, we’re always open to feedback, if there’s a specific way you think we can improve its visibility, feel free to share it on Voice.
This should have been addressed in the 5.4.0.2 update under the changelog note:
“Updated: Site Hardening Inactive themes check now allows one default WordPress theme before raising an alert.”
Hi @David_H ,
Thank you for sharing your concern! We are on the same boat. What do I need to know that MainWP sync? Nope! non MainWP changes was a revolution and eyes opening for us and we loved it, but now, we got thousands of useless entries… Same for the hardening, before it was clean, helpful but now we have more than 500 alerts which 90% of it is related to themes… which we don’t really care as we have proper process in place to maintain it. Last MWP updates ruins those functionalities. You can see my previous topic on that! But, you can still put your request in the “voice” and cross fingers that it will be implemented.
Many thanks for the response Dennis, and I appreciate you!
When things calm down for me I’ll work on a submission to https://voice.mainwp.com , but at the moment things are insanely hectic.
In regard to cleaning-up the mass Site Changes entries, until there’s a new way to handle things more efficiently right from within the Dashboard - I wonder if there’s a safe way to remove them using phpMyAdmin?
I’d be willing to do cleanups from phpMyAdmin, but obviously I don’t want to risk destabilizing things by “guessing” at what could safely be removed. I took a look at the tables in the DB, and it looks like the Non-MainWP changes are stored in mainwp_wp_actions and it looks like the other site changes / Syncs are stored in mainwp_wp_logs_meta , but I would never modify anything in there without knowing if it’s safe.
Thanks for the “Updated: Site Hardening Inactive themes check now allows one default WordPress theme before raising an alert.” nudge. I guess the last time I actually checked the results 4 or 5 days ago.
@bojan - Thank you! I’ll wait for the official release. Very happy to know that’s on the way. Hopefully it will allow us to clear the Sync Data entries in addition to the Non-MainWP changes.
@wpexpert - I did notice your topic as well, but I thought I had maybe some different items to ask about and I didn’t want hijack your thread. Sometimes updates can be a bit frustrating, but usually I just roll with the changes. This one I couldn’t quite ignore. Always looking for ways to improve efficiency and resource performance.
@wpexpert I know you’ve raised this before in multiple threads, so I want to be clear, if you have specific UI improvements you’d like to see, please add them to voice.mainwp.com. I’ve mentioned this channel to you several times, but I only see one comment from you on Site Hardening there so far. Please use that as the avenue to express or “voice” any changes you would like to see in the UI.
You can change this by just clicking the ellipse on the right of the widget to filter if you want only the non-MainWP Changes.
As I pointed out in my first response to the thread:
So if you are still having an issue regarding that open a ticket.
If we get more specific for your theme-related alerts, that you don’t want, there’s is built-in hook that allows you to filter out information you don’t need.
For any issues that seem like bugs rather than design preferences, please open a dedicated support thread with specific details so we can properly investigate.
We value user feedback, but it’s most helpful when channeled through the appropriate systems we’ve put in place.
Posting similar concerns across multiple threads, and in other peoples threads, makes it difficult for us to address yours and the orignal posters feedback effectively. If you feel strongly about certain changes, I’ve provided a direct way to have your voice heard through our feedback system.
Fred, please don’t take my thread down that road. I didn’t intend this to become something negative. My intention was to ask some questions and provide a bit of personal feedback for the team, in a respectful manner.
But seriously, thanks for your feedback.