I am very new to the MainWP. We are a small host currently with 27 sites but growing. I am learning my way around MainWP and think it is one of the best tools we have!
What is the best way to get started learning Pro Reports? I have searched the forum and documents and see many reference to Joshua’s Report but I haven’t seen how to add that.
Is it better to just start from scratch in our case?
Our goal is to provide a monthly branded report to our clients of all the changes to their site for that period.
Don’t automate the sending directly to clients. This is unfortunate but I’ve found over the years that sometimes the reports just don’t generate properly. Data from APIs won’t show up, raw dynamic tags appear in the report, fonts get messed up or some other formatting has a change due to updates etc etc. I batch generate the reports and download them so I can check them and then I email them myself after putting additional content in them.
The logic within the report templates such as (if this plugin exists, show XYZ), only applies to the plugin being installed in MainWP ITSELF, not the client site. Let’s say you have the Updraft plugin in MainWP and also in half your sites, well that information will show up in the report for those sites that don’t have the plugin, which means it won’t properly display. This is a known issue and there may be workarounds, but be careful if you want to show report data from plugins that you don’t actually run on all sites. You will need separate report templates to handle different cases.
There is no easy way to have custom hand-written information added to the report each month. In other words, you said you want a report to show clients “the changes to their site for that period.” Well if those changes include work you’ve performed, such as detailing a bug or downtime event or ongoing project progress, those custom notes won’t be in there. What I do is record my monthly notes in a file, then when I download the PDF report, I merge my hand-written notes into the PDF, making sure they both have the same styles and font and so forth. My notes blend into the design. Once I merge the PDF, I can send it to the client. This is a really important point because in any given month, I may have a list of “suggestions” or “issues” that the client needs to be informed on, and it needs to go in their report. If we work on those issues during the month, their next report has updated notes and lists.
The default report size is legal paper. If you need it to be letter size (8.5x11), then you’ll need a snippet of code to convert the report output.
The PDF export of the report is very different from the email-generated report. Things like new page markers don’t work well in my experience. The CSS is applied differently, the formatting can be different. The PDF will use print styles like (@print) in CSS and obey things like @page and so on. The non-PDF generated page that would go inline in an email doesn’t. Just be sure to test what you need to do.
Make use of tags to group your sites for bulk PDF downloading. I have a template specific to my “Bronze” plans for example, so I can just click the Bronze tag and download all the reports for those sites.
If you happen to use the free version of UptimeRobot, you get 50 monitors for free, which is nice, but Pro Reports uses the API to gather the data. The API on the free plan is limited to 10 requests a minute or something like that. So if you try to bulk download 20 or 30 reports at once with free UptimeRobot, only some sites will have data and the rest will be broken because the API stopped responding.
You can’t generate a full report if the connection to MainWP breaks. Much of the data is gathered in real time, so a disconnected site won’t report much. This can hurt you if, for example, a client randomly leaves you and changes their site to another service, or a new employee or agency deletes the MainWP plugin or whatever it might be. If you try to pull the “last” report for the website for offboarding, it won’t work. My point is, if you do reports on the 1st of the month, and some client moves their site on the 18th, you will not be able to pull a report of all the active work from the 1st to the 18th. You won’t be able to pull anything if the site was disconnected. This is important for when a client cancels services as well. When you start offboarding and deleting plugins and such, pull your last report FIRST before you disconnect anything, or you can’t get that data.
You will have limited access to old reports, so save them! I do monthly reports and I definitely archive them myself. Most of the data within a report is from details gathered in the MainWP Child Reports plugin, but this data is limited to the settings in the plugin. If you set it to 100 days let’s say, you can’t pull a 4 month old report again. And if you use tools from backups or uptime or analytics that don’t have long term storage, your old dated reports won’t be able to pull that either. So it’s actually pretty important to get a good monthly report and then save it yourself just in case.
Make sure to use the report for a little bit of marketing and information. In my report I put information about where to create a ticket and how to contact us and links to things like portal etc. You’ll have to put some of this content in the php custom template, and some can be in the “introduction” and “closing” messages stored in the backend, and some may have to go in the php file.
That’s just some items off the top of my head.
Honestly, I don’t think most clients even open the PDFs, but it helps make sure there is a “touch point” so they know I’m doing stuff.
If there are any real emergency issues, I just contact directly, but there will be notes about it in the report for the month.
When I email the reports to the respected contacts, there is a chance to put some additional content in the email body itself. So I use that to remind them to check the PDF for the hand-written notes, and again how to create a ticket and contact.
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