I swear, each month I feel like I just wrote a month recap, and then I’m immediately writing another!
Our April in Review covered some payment gateway rewrites, while May was a pretty intensive month devoted to WooCommerce 2.6 compatibility.
For each major WooCommerce release, every plugin gets audited and updated (which is over 60 plugins in total, both free and paid). Support for new WooCommerce features, hooks, and methods are added, while support for older versions (in this case, WooCommerce 2.3) is dropped. Every plugin also gets tested in all supported WooCommerce versions, and docs get updated if needed.
As you can imagine, that keeps our dev team pretty tied up for the month! However, even with these updates in progress, we were able to wrap up a couple projects that had been in-development for a bit.
General Updates
Aside from WooCommerce compatibility, we had a couple blog posts to share.
- We wrote a guide to creating member menus for WooCommerce Memberships, with the help of Kathy Darling and her nifty Nav Menu Roles plugin.
- We also published a guide to modifying Print Invoices / Packing Lists templates, as the template structure was changed in our version 3.0 rewrite.
Memberships v1.6.0
WooCommerce Memberships v1.6.0 was a pretty big undertaking, led by Fulvio. It had one major feature: CSV import and export for members. However, this also boasted a fair bit of refactoring to improve how Memberships works with other plugins, such as those that add discounts. This paves the way for some future updates to incorporate what we’ve learned thus far while supporting the plugin.
The member import / export was a highly requested feature, which lets you mass-create members, update members via CSV (as merging is supported), and export a list of members, which can be used in other apps and services (such as an email list).
Exporting can be done via the “Import / Export” tab, which lets you export all members, or filter the export based on plan, status, start date, and / or end date.
Export Settings
Exporting can also be done from the members list via bulk action. Select the members you want to export, and there you have them!
Importing can be done from the “Import / Export” tab as well. As the import requires specific column headers (though order does not matter), please ensure that you’ve reviewed the documentation or the sample CSV files.
Import Settings
You can also get more details in Fulvio’s overview post.
Customer / Coupon / Order CSV Import v3.0.0
We’ve had a rewrite for Customer / Coupon / Order CSV Import in progress for quite some time, led by Illimar. As this was one of our oldest plugins, its structure was at a point where we couldn’t add new features we wanted to add, so we decided to rework it to add popular requests like order merging.
You can now choose your file location before starting an import. Rather than being limited to uploading a file, you can choose a file path, or copy and paste data to import into WooCommerce.
The plugin has been re-architected to support large import files without timeouts, as rows are imported in batches, letting the plugin churn through thousands of rows in an import.
The import formats still require certain data, but the overall format is more flexible in terms of how columns are arranged and which are included. When a file is uploaded for import, you can map columns to the appropriate data.
Map Import Columns
The import process also shows more detailed errors in the event of a failure to import a row, and will also show you a detailed import results screen when an import is completed.
You can check out the announcement post for full details, and be sure to check out the updated documentation for import best practices and sample files.
Customer / Order CSV Export v3.12.0
As Illimar worked on the CSV Import Suite, we realized that, while it includes a massive amount of order data in exported files, there’s still more “microdata” that it can include, such as a tax rate code or more data about fee line items. As such, we introduced a new “CSV Import” format to the Customer / Order CSV Export plugin (the previous format is now called “Legacy CSV Import”).
This new format outputs line item columns JSON format, and it includes the maximum amount of data we can get for each order to make order imports and merging as fluid as possible without risking data loss.
We have more improvements on the way here, but this is a beginning step towards more flexible export formats.
Jilt for WooCommerce beta
Max’s main project for the month was finishing our WooCommerce connector plugin for our Jilt abandoned cart recovery app.
We’re in beta testing with a group of WooCommerce merchants, and we’ll do a live launch soon!
In progress
Finally, we (always) have a lot in active development. Chase is putting the finishing touches on a Fulfillrite connector, and is also wrapping up a major Shipwire update to support new features like split shipments. Tamara is in progress on some Google Analytics Pro fixes and features as well.
Memberships 1.7 is also beginning, and we have improvements in progress for the Customer / Order CSV and XML export plugins based on what we learned from our CSV Import rewrite. Stay tuned for more exciting changes next month 🙂
