Whew, February flew by our our team! Looks like we’re actually managing to make this one month in review instead of 2 🙂
Our January in review went over a lot of development we’d just shipped, so February saw more development beginning than wrapping up. We also had our first company retreat this month, which was fabulous and brought team members from 5 countries together.
Here’s what we worked on this month:
General Updates
Even though we just wrapped up our first SkyTrip, we are gearing up for the second WooConf located in Austin, Texas! While you’ve already missed out on early bird tickets, you can still get $100 off any ticket with our coupon code: WOOCONFSKYVERGE
We also published a few tutorials in February:
- For developers: Checking for any active membership with WC Memberships
- For developers: Adding Custom Sections to the WC Memberships “Member Area”
- Add WooCommerce Admin Email Recipients Conditionally
SkyTrip 1.0
Our biggest project in February was preparing and attending our first SkyTrip. We brought all of our full time team members to Orlando, Florida for a week to get a chance to meet up in person, work together, drink buckets of coffee, enjoy the weather, and have some fun.
We spent some time feeling like kids again in Disney’s Magic Kingdom:
Not to mention while in our house for the week, which had both Frozen and Harry Potter themed rooms — which fortunately were extras 😉
Checking out the Harry Potter-themed room
We enjoyed some team movie nights and Halo tournaments in the theater, which seated 13 people:
But we also got some interesting projects done as well. Since we were all together, we spent a lot of time working on our plugin roadmap for the next few months, working on unit tests for our plugin framework, and building a new development environment that our team can use while building on maintaining plugins.
Print Invoices / Packing Lists Rewrite
This is one we mentioned in January, but then we pivoted on a couple of the features the rewrite addressed following some tester feedback (which we outlined for our email list. We decided to hold up the release to make these changes before launching Print Invoices / Packing Lists version 3.0.
We’ve improved template styling and adding more settings to help you customize templates without code, improved packing lists, added “pick lists” for processing several orders, and some other changes. We’re pretty much done with testing those new changes now and ready to launch this.
First Data Rewrite
We’d also mentioned last month that a First Data rewrite was in progress, and we completed the majority of the development in February. We’re now testing this and it will be ready to ship soon.
We’ve improved the legacy Global Gateway support and set up, which we’d historically had difficulty getting developer access to, and made several improvements to the Payeezy gateway as well.
Paytrail Rewrite
Our Paytrail plugin was one we’d acquired from another developer some time ago, and it hasn’t gotten too much love since it’s a pretty niche gateway. We began a rewrite for this in February, which doubled as a way for us to make some generic improvements in how we handle hosted payment methods (such as better support for cancelled orders).
Our Paytrail rewrite is in the same state as First Data: we’re beginning the testing / QA phase, and we’ll launch the new version as soon as testing has concluded.
Snippets Repo
We’d mentioned last month that we were working on a snippets repository for our extensions. We’ve now added a public repository with almost 100 different snippets (organized by extension), and we’ll continue to maintain these as a team moving forward.
Please note that these samples are available for use, but are not supported in any capacity, and you should be familiar with adding code to your site if you use them.
Testing & Dev Environment
One of the projects we decided to work on while we were on our team trip was improving unit test coverage within our plugin framework. Max had learned a lot from implementing and writing tests for WooCommerce core, so we’re working on a similar approach for testing our plugin framework.
We also put some time into re-vamping our dev environment to make it more stable so that our entire development team can easily use the same environment and switch between WooCommerce versions while building and testing.
In progress
Aside from wrapping up testing of the rewrites we had in progress in February, we’re continuing development in March on Memberships version 1.6, and will begin another round of re-factors / rewrites on some additional payment gateways.
