We hinted at a couple major development projects at the end of our July in Review, and while a couple of those are wrapping up now, we have several other feature releases or rewrites to recap our August development schedule.
General Updates
We had a few tutorial blog posts over the past month that could help you with extensions or some general WooCommerce tweaks.
- Add Social Login Buttons to WooCommerce Memberships: a tutorial on adding WooCommerce Social Login Buttons to WooCommerce Memberships restriction notices
- Prevent Checkout for Carts with Only a Particular Category: how to block checkout from processing if the cart only contains items from a particular category (similar to Amazon “add on” products)
- Hide Product Reviews Until Purchase: how to hide the product reviews tab until a customer has purchased a product (in case you want to gather some initial reviews before making them public)
I also worked with Veeqo last week on a webinar that’s now available to view: Optimizations for WooCommerce stores
WooCommerce Shipwire version 2.0
WooCommerce Shipwire version 2.0 was released in August, which includes a refactor and some new features.
First, split orders are now supported, which means that customers can place an order of both managed and non-managed products, and the order is split into multiple shipments. This allows Shipwire to fulfill the products it manages, while you can complete the order with non-managed products on your end.
This also upgrades the API version being used by our plugin, which means we can now support serial number scanning via Shipwire. For electronics sellers or other merchants that need to track which serial number a customer purchases, this can now be done on the Shipwire end, and the plugin will add the serial number to the order.
Finally, the customer views have been improved to include tracking links in the order completed email and on the “View Order” screen once they’re available.
You can view our announcement post for more details and screenshots.
WooCommerce Chase Paymentech version 1.8
This version of WooCommerce Chase Paymentech completely refactored the certification mode in the plugin.
While merchants are required to certify their own sites for Chase’s merchant certification process, we’ve included a certification mode since version 1.1 to try to make the process easier. However, we found that over time, merchants were getting different versions of the certification process to complete.
As such, we’ve redone our certification mode to be more flexible and less tied to a particular set of test cases. While this means it’s not as explicit as it was in previous versions, the certification mode should now be more suitable regardless of which test cases merchants have to submit to get live API credentials.
WooCommerce Order Status Control version 1.7
WooCommerce Order Status Control got a small feature addition this month as well: merchants can now disable auto-completion of orders entirely.
By default, WooCommerce will automatically complete orders that only contain products marked virtual + downloadable, as it’s assumed that these orders need no action after payment. The “None” setting in our plugin did not remove this behavior, which could be confusing.
Now a true “no autocomplete” setting is available in addition to auto-completing virtual orders, or all orders.
WooCommerce Tab Manager version 1.7
Our WooCommerce Tab Manager plugin helps you manage the tabs or sections on your product page, and one of the most often-requested features was the ability to limit the display of certain tabs based on product category.
Version 1.7 adds the ability to limit the display of a tab to particular product categories, so it could be a part of your global or default layout, but only display for certain products automatically.
In Progress
We hinted at these last month, but we have two projects wrapping up this week:
- Memberships 1.7 ran into some issues with testing in July at scale, so our testing phase uncovered these and let us patch them up. We’re now finalizing testing and should release within a week or two!
- Customer / Order XML Export 2.0 was started last month, which is also wrapping up testing this week. This adds automated customer exports, a custom format builder for exports, more performant export processing, and more.
We’ve also got a couple others now in development:
- Elavon Converge is getting a rewrite, and this adds Subscriptions support, refund support, and lots of other payment gateway goodies.
- Authorize.net CIM will have Accept.js support just like our AIM integration soon!
And finally, a couple new plugins that you should hear more about soon 🙂
