Content Error or Suggest an Edit
Notice a grammatical error or technical inaccuracy? Let us know; we will give you credit!
Introduction
This is more or less to archive the Black Friday deal newsletter, which talks about the very last GridPane Black Friday deal, upcoming features and the closure of the GridPane roadmap portal.
GridPane 2025 Black Friday Deal
What's up, WordPress Warriors! Many years ago, we launched our very first Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotion, and we took the non-consensus move, at the time, of launching it many days before Black Friday. Specifically, we launched on the Sunday before BFCM... AKA today! Today we're launching our very last BFCM promotional special for the GridPane platform and, I regret to inform you, this is the absolute least sexy offering we've ever done for this time of year. It's a coupon. It's a discount. Nothing more, nothing less. Black Friday As we are sunsetting the good/better/best tiers and shifting towards an a la carte "choose your own adventure" pricing model, the currently available plans (which you can still get to inside the platform if you know where to look) are already the very best pricing we can possibly offer, and so we're just going with a plain old boring discount, but it will save you at least $1000 a year on what is effectively unlimited WordPress hosting. We’re offering a 20% discount for our Developer Plus Annual plan. You can get this deal by applying the following coupon code to your account under Settings > Payment Method. Coupon Code: BFCM-GP-Dev-Plus-2025 Once that’s applied, you can switch your plan to the Developer Plus Annual under Subscription. If you’re already on the Developer Plus Annual plan and you want to jump on this free money, please open a billing ticket and we’ll get you sorted ASAP. So if you're reading this now, you may already have the best possible plan for your needs. If not, consider bumping up to the Developer Plus annual plan with a 20% lifetime discount applied, so long as your account remains active. Our primary focus for Black Friday / Cyber Monday moving forward is helping other people/companies successfully run their own massive BFCM launches without missing a single transaction. If you have a big launch coming soon and need assistance, you might still be able to grab a spot on my schedule here: Book a hardcore dweeb session with Patrick
GridPane Platform Updates November 2025
The Client Portal (formerly PanelPress) The new Client Portal release has taken longer than expected — partly because we’ve expanded the feature set more than originally intended, and partly because we’ve been refactoring core parts of the main app and our API to make sure these new features are built on the right foundation for the long term. It's close, and it's our top priority. SMTP Since SendGrid removed their free tier, we’ve had a lot of questions about providing an alternative. Long story short, we have plans for SMTP, but it will differ from our SendGrid integration. We don’t have an ETA right now, but it’s also not a hugely complicated project. Nginx Helper We’ve officially moved to our own fork of the Nginx Helper plugin. This new version includes additional purging options (such as purging the cache of plugin updates), and the mu-plugin for FastCGI cache purging is no longer necessary, as that functionality is now built in. Additional features will be added in the future. Nginx Version and OpenSSL Update We now run the latest versions of Nginx and OpenSSL. These are future-proof for many years to come, and with the latest version of Nginx, HTTP3 is out of beta and production-ready. Roadmap The roadmap software we use forced an update on us a while back, and it hasn’t been fit for purpose for a while now. We’re building our own with WordPress to replace it, and like our knowledge base, we’ll detail how we built it in a future blog post. We hope everyone’s had a great 2025 so far, and we wish you all the best over the holidays! We’ll have another update for you soon, including more details on all of the above. Cheers, Patrick
GridPane Roadmap Archive November 2025
Jordan Trask
With 20 years of experience in technology spanning Linux, Data Center Infrastructure, and related services and applications, Jordan consults with small, medium, and large organizations tackling technology problems and needs. With 10 years of experience in WordPress, he’s created Managing WP as a means of dumping his brain on the web.
Jordan operates LMT Solutions providing Technology Consulting Services and We Power WP for WordPress Care Plans and Support.