These months just keep rolling by us! Time for another monthly recap 🙂
Our August review mentioned some of the development updates we’ve got today, and we have some new projects in progress as well.
General Updates
I don’t have too many general updates to share this month, other than it’s been crazy and exciting with several releases on our end.
We haven’t written too many blog tutorials since we’ve been busy announcing updates, but we did do a write up on how to disable repeat purchases across a particular product category.
WooCommerce Memberships 1.7.0
Memberships 1.7 is a massive update released this month after an in-depth testing cycle. This adds several new features as there were a lot of requests that were interconnected, so it was easier for our team to tackle them at once.
- Expiration Emails – Memberships has added emails before a membership ends, when it expires, and a “win-back” after the expiration to prompt renewal. These emails are disabled by default, but will be added for memberships that have an end date.
Content can be configured on a per-plan basis so the email responds to the plan’s options, like whether it can be renewed or not.
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Free Memberships – Access can now be granted for user registration, no more need for a free product / checkout! Note that this applies to any WordPress user registration, so things like Gravity Forms registration forms will work, along with the WooCommerce account registration form.
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Fixed-Date Memberships – Plans can now run from set calendar dates rather than based on a length (ie 6 months).
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Subscriptions Installments – Membership access can now be de-coupled from Subscription billing, adding support for installment plans. For example, you can have a 3 month, 3 payment subscription, but grant 1 year of access. Chris Lema wrote a great overview about why you might want or need this set up.
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CLI Support – This one’s for the devs 😀 We have a CLI command reference available, and welcome feedback on development tools.
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Discounts tweaks – We have 3 main tweaks for discounts in this version:
- Exclude sale products – There’s now a setting to prevent member discounts from applying to products on sale.
- Product Exclusions – If you have a category-based rule, you can now do product-specific discount exclusions just like the “make public” action for content.
- Prevent member discount stacking – This one’s a filter, not a setting. This can be alted to allow one member discount at a time, even if a member has paid for multiple memberships that each have discounts. Users can prevent stacking with this snippet to use only the highest discount.
Want the more details? Fulvio has an extensive announcement post with all of the changes.
WooCommerce Customer / Order XML Export 2.0
Our Customer / Order XML Export 2.0 update completely refactors the plugin for improved performance and lots of new features.
- Custom Format Builder — Detemine which XML tags are included, and easily re-order or rename them for your exported file. Doesn’t cover every customization case, but certainly makes it much easier for end users to tweak exports themselves.
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Asynchronous exports — Export thousands of records at a time. Start and export and leave it for later. Even leave the site completely! The plugin will let you know when it’s done.
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Export List — Save a list of exports for 14 days to re-download a file when needed, monitor export transfers to ensure they’re successful (and the plugin will alert you if not!), or save your exports to this list on a schedule (without transferring them via FTP, email, or HTTP POST).
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Automate customer exports — Export customers and transfer the file on a schedule, just like automated order exports.
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New order export filters — You can now filter order exports by what product or category was purchased in addition to order status.
WooCommerce Authorizet.Net CIM 2.4.0
Authorize.Net rolled out Accept.js earlier this summer to help merchants increase payment security and meet lower levels of PCI compliance without any additional steps needed.
Version 2.4.0 of our Authorize.Net CIM integration adds full Accept.js support for any kind of transaction, whether it’s a one-time charge or the card will be saved for future purchases or subscriptions, helping merchants using CIM achieve PCI compliance without further certification steps.
This release also adds authorization messages for eCheck transactions to reduce your liability on ACH transfers.
WooCommerce Customer / Coupon / Order CSV Import 3.1.0
Here’s one that’s hot off the press! Customer / Coupon / Order CSV Import Suite has has now improved import messaging and how import dry runs are handled.
When an import has begun, it’s now clearer that you can leave the import page and the import will continue to progress in the background.
If this import was a dry run, the plugin will show you a notice when the dry run has been completed so you can go back to the progress page and review the results.
Once you’ve reviewed your dry run, we’ve made it easier to adjust or run it if needed by condensing the notices down into one action message. We’ve also added a link to make it easy to go back to the import settings if they need adjustment so you don’t have to restart the import process to make changes.
Once you start a live import job, you’ll be able to leave it as well, as see the same improved notice in your admin when the import file is complete, including a link to the progress page so it’s easier to get back to (previously you had to copy the link manually ?).
This small feature release is geared towards making imports even more seamless and getting them out of your way so you can continue working while import files process, and easily return to them when your attention is needed.
In Progress
As always, we have several changes in development. We’re close to finishing a couple of them:
- Elavon Converge has undergone a massive update to leverage features many of our gateways now have. This update is getting some final tests, and adds tokenization / Subscriptions support, refund and void support, authorization captures from within WooCommerce, adding saved cards from the account, an enhanced checkout form, and some other refinements.
- URL Coupons is getting better compatibility with CSV Import to make importing URL-type coupons easier, and will also have some improved error messages for when deferred coupons can be applied or not.
- Social Login has a large update in progress to move to a new authentication library (HybridAuth) that’s more actively maintained.
As always, keep an eye out for announcement posts 🙂 Enjoy your October and cheers to entering Q4 of this year!
