Softaculous is an Auto-Installer like Fantastico and Installatron. While WordPress is not included in its Free Scripts, the price for a paid version of Softaculous is about $2.5 per month. This is quite a small price to pay for the benefits that it will give you. This article deals with the valuable addition that Softaculous has to offer as far as your WordPress experience is concerned. The aim of this article is to highlight the need for an Auto-Installer to make WordPress Management easy and less troublesome.
Auto Fill
The Softaculous installer automatically fills in the installation form when you are about to install WordPress. This means that it auto-fills field like the Database Name, Database Table Prefix, Site Name, Site Description, Admin username, Admin password, the admin email address and the Default Language to be used. Auto-filling these field helps to maintain consistency of the naming conventions (like database prefix) and also helps to randomize values (like database name and admin password) so that it becomes difficult for hackers to guess the password or database name. This saves the admin the headache of cooking up some innovative options and allows WordPress to be installed in a jiffy. It also aids newbie users by prompting them on what values should be ideally put into the text fields. This can be a big relief for people who were previously intimated by the built-in WordPress installer, which was not newbie friendly. If you are not satisfied with what Softaculous has suggested, you can always modify the values in the text box of the form. This ensures flexibility for those who want customization.
Advanced Options
Softaculous Contains a set of Advanced options which allows you to ensure the safety and data integrity of your WordPress blog or website. The form allows you to setup Update Notifications which will alert you when a new WordPress version becomes available for installation. This means that you don’t need to bother to keep a check on whether you have the latest WordPress software which is more secure as compared to earlier versions.
Automatic upgrade of WordPress is another feature which Softaculous provides. This means that you can setup Softaculous to automatically backup your WordPress files and upgrade them to the latest WordPress version as soon as it becomes available. This means that you need not bother about upgrading your WordPress installation and can concentrate on building good content for your site.
Automatic Upgrade of Plugins and Themes
This is a newer feature of Softaculous. It allows you to upgrade all your Plugins and Themes to their latest version. Buggy plugins are a major cause of security exploits in WordPress. This means that any 3rd party software that you install may contain some vulnerabilities which may be rectified in newer versions of the plugin. Although WordPress allows you to update the plugins and themes from inside the Admin interface, softaculous allows you to schedule updates and automatically updates the core plugin and theme files, without your intervention. It is always advisable to take a regular backup of your site, incase the automatic process fails and causes your site to crash.
Automatic Backups
Softaculous allows you to Automate backups of your WordPress install. This means that you can automatically backup your website on a daily, weekly or monthly basis into your home directory of your hosting account. You can then download the files to your computer at a later date. Incase you have a plan with limited space, you can choose to rotate the backups I.e. If the backup rotation limit is reached, Softaculous will delete the oldest backup for that WordPress installation and create a new backup.
Softaculous also pulls the information from your WordPress config file and displays the details of the install in a simple form, which you can use to sharethe backend details with your development team.
Softaculous needs to be bought by your hosting provider and installed on their server. We highly recommend Softaculous due to the ease of use and smooth functioning with cPanel / WHM. It is easy for the Admin as well as the end user. Softaculous and cPanel are an awesome combination which is a must have.
