Customizing the Plesk Obsidian Home Screen

Plesk Obsidian 18.0.61 and later versions introduce an enhanced, customizable Home screen experience. This updated interface offers a significant improvement over the previous static Home screen, which displayed a fixed set of server information for all users. The new design empowers individual Plesk administrators to tailor their view, ensuring that only the most pertinent information is presented. Customization is achieved by activating or deactivating specific widgets, each designed to deliver insights into various server aspects, such as current resource consumption or the timestamp of the most recent server backup. This guide will walk you through the process of enabling and personalizing your new Plesk Home screen to optimize your administrative workflow.

Prerequisites

The innovative Home screen feature is progressively being deployed across all Plesk servers operating on Plesk Obsidian 18.0.61 or newer. Should you wish to manually enable this feature without waiting for the automatic rollout, you can do so by incorporating the subsequent lines into your panel.ini file:

[navigation]
newHomeView.enabled = true

Upon successful activation, the new Home screen will transform your Plesk interface, presenting a modernized and flexible layout.

Customizing Your Home Screen

After successfully enabling the new Home screen, you gain the ability to personalize it extensively, ensuring it displays only the information most relevant to your specific administrative needs within Plesk. This customization involves strategically adding or removing various informational widgets, as well as organizing their layout on the screen.

Note: It is important to remember that any customizations applied to an individual Plesk administrator's Home screen are unique to that account and will not impact the appearance or configuration of the Home screen for other administrator accounts on the same server.

Adding or Removing Home Screen Widgets

Follow these straightforward steps to manage the widgets displayed on your Plesk Home screen:

1. Log in to your Plesk control panel.
2. Locate and click the Customize button, typically situated in the top right corner of the screen.
3. Within the customization drawer that appears, use the provided toggle buttons to enable or disable individual widgets according to your preferences.
4. Once you have made your selections, simply close the drawer by clicking the designated button.

Upon completing these steps, your Home screen will dynamically update to showcase only the widgets you have chosen to enable, streamlining your administrative dashboard.

Note: The availability of certain widgets is contingent upon the installation of their corresponding extensions within Plesk. For instance, to access and utilize the “CPU usage” and “Memory usage” widgets, the Monitoring extension must be installed on your Plesk server.

Rearranging Home Screen Widgets

To optimize the visual flow and accessibility of information on your Home screen, you can easily rearrange the widgets:

1. Log in to Plesk.
2. Position your mouse cursor over the top right corner of the widget you wish to reposition. An icon (often a drag handle) will become visible.
3. Click and hold down the left mouse button on this icon, then drag and drop the widget to your preferred location on the Home screen.

The widget will seamlessly move to its new designated spot, allowing you to create an intuitive and efficient dashboard layout.

Available Home Screen Widgets

Plesk offers a diverse selection of widgets to enrich your Home screen. Currently, the following informative widgets are available for customization, enabling you to keep essential server and service details at your fingertips:

• Plesk Version: Displays the current Plesk version installed on your server, along with notifications for any available updates, ensuring you stay informed about the latest releases.
• Server Information: Provides crucial details about your server, including its hostname, primary IP address, operating system, and current uptime, offering a quick overview of its status.
• Last Server Backup: Shows the most recent server backup status and details concerning your backup schedule, vital for data recovery preparedness.
• Performance Booster: (Applicable for Plesk for Linux) Highlights potential server and website performance optimizations that can be applied to enhance speed and efficiency.
• What’s New: Keeps you updated with the latest entries from the Plesk changelog, informing you about new features, improvements, and bug fixes.
• IP Address Banning: Indicates the operational status of the Fail2Ban service, which is crucial for protecting your server against brute-force attacks by banning suspicious IP addresses.
• Mail Queue: Monitors the status of your email queue (specifically for Postfix), helping you identify and manage any pending outbound mail.
• Promo: Presents information about potential customizations, additional features, and extensions that can further enhance your Plesk experience.
• CPU Usage: Provides daily insights into your server's CPU utilization, allowing you to track performance trends. This widget requires the Monitoring extension to be installed.
• Memory Usage: Displays daily information regarding your server's memory consumption, which is essential for resource management and identifying potential bottlenecks. This widget also requires the Monitoring extension.
• Subscriptions with Overuse: Lists any subscriptions that are currently exceeding their allocated resource limits, enabling proactive management and billing adjustments.
• My Subscriptions: Shows a comprehensive list of all subscriptions managed by the logged-in administrator, offering a centralized view of your hosted services.
• Custom Buttons: Allows for the display of custom buttons that have been added by the administrator, providing quick access to frequently used scripts or external tools.
• SSL/TLS Certificates: Identifies hosted websites that are not yet secured with an SSL/TLS certificate, prompting you to enhance their security posture. This widget requires the SSL It! extension.
• Advisor: Presents your current Advisor rating, offering guidance and recommendations for improving server security, performance, and overall configuration. This widget requires the Advisor extension.

Advanced Customization: Managing the Home Screen via CLI

For administrators requiring more granular control or wishing to enforce a standardized Home screen experience across multiple accounts, Plesk provides command-line interface (CLI) options. These tools allow you to prevent individual administrators from customizing their Home screen and to apply a predefined set of widgets, effectively centralizing the dashboard configuration.

Disabling Home Screen Customization

To prevent administrators from modifying their Home screen widgets or layout through the Plesk interface, follow these steps:

1. Access your Plesk server using SSH (for Linux) or RDP (for Windows).
2. Execute the following command in your terminal:

plesk bin interface_template --lock-home

Once this command is executed, the "Customize" button on the Home screen will be hidden, restricting administrators from adding or removing widgets. However, it's important to note that users may still be able to rearrange the existing widgets. To revert this change and restore the "Customize" button, simply run the command: plesk bin interface_template --unlock-home.

Displaying Specific Widgets on the Home Screen

If you wish to enforce a specific selection of widgets on the Home screen, effectively creating a standardized template, use the following procedure:

1. Connect to your Plesk server via SSH or RDP.
2. Run the command below, replacing <widget_name_1>,<widget_name_2>,...,<widget_name_n> with a comma-separated list of the exact widget names you want to display:

plesk bin interface_template --lock-home-template "<widget_name_1>,<widget_name_2>,...,<widget_name_n>"

For example, to display only the server information and changelog widgets, you would use:

plesk bin interface_template --lock-home-template "serverInfo,changeLog"

This command not only sets a specific widget arrangement but also disables the ability for administrators to customize their Home screen from the UI. To retrieve a comprehensive list of all available widgets and their corresponding names for use with this command, execute: plesk bin interface_template --home-blocks-list.