Introduction to x3, our new cPanel theme
If you’ve logged in to your control panel recently you’ll have noticed it has a brand new look to it. The new theme, called x3, is included with cPanel as standard and brings with it a number of usability improvements as well as lots of new features. We’ll be covering some of the features in this and future articles. Click on the image below for a preview:
cPanel main page (click to enlarge)
New Location
The location of x3 is slightly different to the old theme so if you have any bookmarks that take you directly into your control panel you may now receive a ‘404 not found’ error.
Fortunately, the fix is easy: replace your bookmark with a link to http://domain.com/cpanel (replacing domain.com with your domain name) – that address will always reach the correct location of your control panel.
Email facilities have been vastly improved in the new control panel. Managing your email accounts, forwarders and auto-responders is now far easier than it ever has been, with less technical knowledge needed to make use of the advanced options. For instance, you can now put a date limit on your auto-responder, stopping your “I’m on holiday” emails when you forget to disable it!
Filtering email is as easy as can be, allowing you to easily put a stop to emails that aren’t readily caught by the main spam filter. Receiving a newsletter that you can’t unsubscribe from? Simply add a filter to match the subject or the sender and you’ll never see it again.
Setting up DomainKeys or SPF records can now be done directly via your control panel rather than asking us to do it. In the ‘Email Authentication’ page of the control panel you can set them up to your exact configuration with the easy-to-use wizard.
For the BlackBerry users among us, some of our servers support FastMail, allowing you to send and receive email instantly on your BlackBerry with your domain name. For more information see the ‘Email Accounts’ page in your control panel – if you see the ‘BlackBerry FastMail’ link at the bottom it’s enabled and ready for use; follow the link for instructions for setting it up. We’ll be migrating email services to enable FastMail support on all of our servers in due course. Currently only a handful of our servers support FastMail.
File Management
The new file manager will be a breath of fresh air for anybody who used the old one. As useful as it was, navigation wasn’t made easy at all! The new file manager has a modernised interface and is very easy to use. Take a look:
cPanel x3 File Manager (click to enlarge)
Aside from being easier to use, new features make it easier to manage your account, too, with handling of zip files integrated directly into the menus. It’s now trivial to upload a script in a zip file and extract it on the server – much faster than uploading hundreds of thousands of little files yourself by FTP.
On top of this, the backup manager has been given a facelift making backups as easy as possible. Please make sure you’ve always got an up to date backup of your account!
DNS Management
DNS stands for ‘Domain Name System’ and is the facility that enables computers to translate a name such as blog.freevirtualservers.com into its IP address, in this case 78.31.105.202.
When making use of third party services such as Google Docs or an online shop with Shopify you’ll usually need to alter your DNS records to point to the new service. You can now do that yourself via the control panel using the ‘Simple DNS Zone Editor’ (there’s also an Advanced DNS Zone Editor for those requiring more control. Not available on free hosting accounts)
cPanel X3 Advanced Zone Editor (click to enlarge)
Databases
The new MySQL database wizard makes creating databases a breeze. It’s not usually something you’ll do very often so when you do create a database you’ll want it to be as easy as possible. The wizard turns a confusing 3-step process into one simple process with an easy to follow workflow.
PHP and Perl
For advanced users it’s now possible to install Perl modules and PHP extensions from the PEAR repository directly within the control panel. Historically you’d have had to ask us to install additional modules for you and wait while they’re evaluated for suitability. Now, you can do it yourself without delay.
That’s about it for our cPanel x3 introduction – be sure to check back as we’ll be taking an in-depth look at many of the new features. Subscribe to the RSS feed to be notified when new posts are made!
As always if you have any issues specifically with the new control panel please don’t hesitate to submit a ticket to support and we’ll do our best to assist!
Is there something specific you’d like to learn more about? Let us know by posting a comment.
