As you may have seen, we have been upgrading Watchfuls Akeeba Backup Pro (ABP) integration over the last few months. The Watchful API update for backup plugin selection that supported this process is now available.

Why is this change happening?

In 2019, ABP 7 was released for both Joomla and WordPress. This release included an updated and improved API (the “version 2 API” ) that offered better reliability and more features.

Akeeba is deprecating the legacy (version 1) API in ABP soon. We decided to add support for version 2 to minimize the impact on backups for users of both ABP and Watchful.

What is the status of the migration?

We have taken a very cautious approach to migrating sites to version 2 of the ABP API. First, we selected only sites with compatible CMS and ABP versions for migration. Then, we migrated sites in small batches with careful monitoring of backup success rates.

While it has been time consuming, this approach has allowed us to detect and fix issues before they could significantly impact the number of successful backups in our platform.

We’ve now migrated thousands of sites with an error rate of just 0.3%. We expect to complete the migration process by Nov. 11, 2021. 

An API update for backup plugin selection

In order to prepare for this migration, we modified the Watchful API to better support the modern ABP technology as described above. This affected two of Watchfuls API endpoints:

• createSites — used to add sites to Watchful
• updateSiteId — used to update existing sites at Watchful

Each endpoint has a backup_plugin parameter that accepts values to specify the backup plugin when creating or updating sites. We changed the values accepted by this parameter to include akeebav2 when specifying the ABP version 2 API.

Here is the full list of values currently accepted by the backup_plugin parameter.

• akeebav2 — ABP version 2 API
• akeeba — ABP legacy API
• ai1wm — All-in-One WordPress Migration
• xcloner — XCloner

What will you build with the Watchful API?

Above we described how we updated the Watchful API to improve backup plugin selection related to ABP.

Of course, we encourage all our users to be creative and integrate Watchful into their own applications. For example, you may want to add all the software updates performed on a site to your monthly invoices like Anchored Web did.

Or perhaps you want a custom client portal with key site metrics and on-demand reports like the one Inspiry built.

Whatever the application, we have the resources to get you started.

For beginners, we have a great tutorial on building your own website dashboard. Our knowledge base also has some useful introductory information to get you started.

More experienced developers can review the API knowledge base and then jump right into the interactive API documentation.