Customizing Power User View

Power User view has a subtype, Custom View (available in Tools & Settings > Interface Management), which serves two main purposes:

  • To simplify the user experience of administrators who use managed hosting.

    Some administrators carry out only basic administration tasks (monitoring system services, administering user accounts, and so on) leaving more complex tasks, usually server and services configuration, to the support service of a service provider. This user group wants to have only tools they really need and hide the other tools.

  • Make Plesk safer and more comfortable.

    Administrators can revoke some of their permissions to hide the tools they do not need in everyday operations and return to the full-featured Power User view only when they need some system tuning (for example, to turn on server backups).

If you go to the Tools & Settings > Custom View Settings page (the Administrative Tools section), you can select the tools the administrator will see in this view. The view settings may be unavailable if the service provider who gave you access to Plesk has decided to lock Custom view.

Locking Custom View and Hiding Custom View Settings

To lock Custom view means to limit the selection of Plesk features available to the administrator and disallow any changes to the features list. Thus, when Custom view is locked, it is impossible to switch to any other view from the GUI (or XML API) or change the Custom view settings. Generally, if you are a service provider, you can make some tools unavailable to administrators, and, thus, separate Plesk administration into two parts:

  • Day-by-day operations. These operations are performed by the Plesk administrator, the person who purchased the web hosting.
  • Complex configuration and maintenance. These operations are accomplished by your support team. Such operations may include configuration of a network, DNS, web server and so on.

If a Plesk administrator needs a certain feature and is unable to find it, your support team turns this feature on by unlocking Custom view, modifying the view settings, and locking the view again.

Custom view is locked only through a command-line call of the poweruser utility:

poweruser --on -simple true -lock true

The lock is removed by calling poweruser --on -lock false.

Custom View and Administrator’s Own Subscripitons

The peculiarity of Custom view is that you can instantly adjust permissions, hosting parameters, PHP settings, and other subscription parameters of all subscriptions you have created in this view. This is possible because each subscription you create in this view derives from the artificial Custom service plan that is not visible in the plans list. The settings of this plan are available in Tools & Settings > Custom View Settings. When you change the settings, the changes (if possible) are automatically applied to all subscriptions under the Custom plan.

Another point that deserves attention is that the Custom plan has a special permission, Ability to create, remove, and switch among subscriptions. If this permission is cleared in the GUI, it is not possible to create subscriptions in Custom view.

If you need to adjust custom view settings through the command-line, use the admin utility. Learn more about the utility options in Plesk Onyx for Linux (Windows): Reference for Command Line Utilities.