It is hard to believe that September 2022 marks Watchful’s 10th anniversary. Not many businesses make it to 10 years. So I’m both proud and humbled to continue providing useful services to web developers, site maintainers and digital agencies. How it started & how it’s going 15 years ago I Read more…
Summertime is typically a bit of a slower period here at Watchful. So our engineers get a chance to chip away at some of the less-urgent tasks on our roadmap. While many of these don’t warrant their own blog post, I thought it might be useful to compile our platform Read more…
With over 22 plugins on the WordPress repository, Jordy Meow is a prolific plugin developer. Of these 22, seven have premium versions available from the Meow Apps website. Popular titles include Perfect Images Pro and Media Cleaner Pro. One of Watchful’s unique features is the ability to update premium WordPress Read more…
With the recent challenges imposed by COVID-19, it’s not surprising that the number of people earning an income from independent work in the U.S. rose 34 percent in 2021 (see below). But making the switch to freelance web development full-time is not an easy decision. To successfully make the switch, Read more…
One of the things that sets Watchful apart from other WordPress maintenance tools is our support for Premium WordPress plugin updates. Update support for the following paid plugins/plugin suites is now live: GiveWP add-ons Formidable Forms WP Staging PRO Advanced Ads Pro Updates for GiveWP add-ons GiveWP is a powerful Read more…
There is only one way to safely update plugins on your WordPress site: make sure that you have a recent backup handy before you start! Today we released a new update fresh feature for the bulk updater. Update fresh will cut maintenance time significantly while giving you the confidence to Read more…
Recently a Watchful Premium user contacted our support team with an urgent request. An update for a custom theme had been released, but it was not yet appearing in Watchful’s updater. Was there another way to install urgent website updates across all the affected sites? Before we give the solution, Read more…
Updating to the latest version of Joomla is perhaps the single most important way to keep your website safe. The latest supported versions of Joomla are the 3.10.x series and the 4.0.x series. All Joomla users should be running one of these two major versions. In August of 2021, Joomla Read more…
Like may premium software developers, license keys are used to apply premium YooTheme updates to their users websites. Surprisingly, YooTheme announced a big change their licensing system a few days before Christmas. The licensing change prevented Watchful users from mass-updating YooThemes paid Joomla extensions. In the weeks since the announcement, Read more…
Image credit: Brian Teeman. Joomla 4.0.4 launched on October 26, 2021. It includes changes that make the Joomla update process more efficient, but may also break the update process. Below we will review the steps needed to fix this and future-proof Joomla 4 updates. Why are changes needed? Joomla 4.0.4 Read more…