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WP Ultimo 1.5.5 – Release Notes

Hello, everyone. Version 1.5.5 is out! It adds some cool new features and fixes important issues across the plugin. Let’s dive in, shall we?

tl;dr: 1.6.0 containing tax support will take longer, so 1.5.5 is being released as an intermediary release with new features. It addresses mapped domain issues in the customizer; implements a top-bar on the site template screen; global plugin activation for plans, and notification emails when trials and subscriptions are about to expire.

Why 1.5.5 and not 1.6.0?

Our original plan was to release version 1.6.0, a major update containing tax support and VAT functionality. However, Implementing Tax support and making all the features around it 100% VAT compliant requires some changes on how WP Ultimo processes things internally, which will take more time to get done.

As we had a bunch of cool features and important fixes implemented, we didn’t want to make you wait a lot more so we could ship them alongside tax support, so I decided to release this intermediary version to make the new features & fixes available.

Tax Support & VAT will be released soon as a “feature-plugin”, meaning it will be available on the add-ons page as a free add-on so people can test and provide feedback. After that phase, we will incorporate that feature into core once everything is sorted out.

What’s new on 1.5.5?

Here are some of the cool features we added on version 1.5.5.

Top-bar on Site Template Previews

WP Ultimo now adds a top-bar on the site template preview screen, during the sign-up. This allows the potential client to simply click on the “Use this template button” to select that template, to easily navigate between templates from the drop-down menu (with mini-previews) and even visualize the responsiveness of the chosen template by switching to different device screen sizes.

The top-bar colors and texts can be edited in the WP Ultimo Settings -> Styling Tab, and this functionality can be disabled altogether on WP Ultimo Settings -> Network Settings.

Activating and Deactivating Plugins for Plans

Network admins can now globally activate/deactivate plugins for all the sites on a specific plan directly from the Network Admin Plugins list.

The process is done in the background to avoid timeouts and other issues (possible when dealing with large networks) and runs the activate and deactivate hooks of each plugin selected, allowing them to correctly set-up custom tables and other necessary things if needed.

Expiring and Expired Trial and Subscription Emails

Emails for expiring and expired trial periods and subscriptions were also added in this release. Network admins can now set in how many days before the trial or subscription is set to expire they want to send the notification email.

An email also gets sent once the trial or subscription expires and no payment method was added.

Both emails can be disabled and modified in the WP Ultimo Settings -> Emails Tab, where the admins can also set the “days prior” setting.

Bugfixes

This version also addresses important issues, especially regarding mapped domains.
The customizer now loads sites with mapped domains without any issues on the previewer screen. Image srcset attributes are also being filtered, replacing the old image URLs with mapped versions when a domain map is present, prevent CORS issues.

Complete Changelog

Release Notes – WP Ultimo 1.5.0 & WooCommerce Integration 1.1.0

Hello, everyone! Version 1.5.0 is here!

It solves a large number of issues being experienced by some users as well as implement long-awaited features from our roadmap. It also implements the necessary changes necessary to allow us to further develop WP Ultimo: Plugin and Theme Manager to include package sales.

Fixes & Improvements Overview

We fixed the issue some users were having with disk space not updating after an upgrade/downgrade. The original Network URLs are now added to the allowed list to prevent CORS issues when loading assets on mapped domains and more and more edge cases are covered in the SSL handling.

Another major fix was making the create_user function in the signup timezone sensitive. That prevents delays on Stripe and PayPal, resolving situations where a charge would take a few hours to process after a user integrated due to timezone differences, effectively locking the user out of his/her own site even after he/she initiated the payment process.

Multiselect fields on our Settings page are now sortable. Templates can now be sorted into the order the admin wants them to be displayed for the user on the front-end.

Manual Gateway

Our Manual Gateway now handles change in plans more consistently and now checks if it needs to send the invoice right after integration, to prevent the same delay issue described above.

The Instructions to Pay field is now a WP Editor field with basic HTML support. A link called “Instructions to Pay” was added to the billing history below the pending payment line that when clicked opens a modal with the contents of the Instructions. Keep in mind that those instructions are also printed at the bottom of invoices – where HTML is not supported – so in that context, HTML tags will be removed.

Domain Mapping and SSL

In order to keep the Network Settings tab cleaner, we moved all the settings related to Domain Mapping and SSL to their own separate settings tab. A handy summary table was also added to that tab, to help admins visualize how the different settings interfere with each other.

Geo-location Restrictions

Starting from version 1.5.0, admins will now be able to restrict sign-ups geographically. You can select the list of Countries you want to allow and only users located in that country will be able to sign-up.

Restricted Content Shortcode

Although we like to make clear that WP Ultimo IS NOT a membership-restrict-content-type plugin, we added a simple shortcode for restricting content. It can be used to display information selectively to subscribers on the main site or to decide whether or not an ad should be displayed to users accessing that site. More information about that shortcode can be found in the dedicated knowledge base post: https://docs.wpultimo.com/knowledge-base/shortcodes/

Password Strength Meter

Now there is a filter available to activate the default password strength meter for the signup flow. More information about how to achieve that can be found in the dedicated knowledge base article: https://docs.wpultimo.com/knowledge-base/adding-a-strength-meter-to-password-fields

WooCommerce Integration – Version 1.1.0

This version of WooCommerce Integration implements upgrade/downgrade and fixes a number of issues, making it more stable overall.

It also addresses the issue of having to have WooCommerce Network Active for it to work. Now, WooCommerce payments are possible even if WooCommerce is activated only in the main site of the network.

Complete Changelog – Version 1.5.0 – 04/11/2017

– Fixed: Manual Gateway handling upgrades and downgrades;
– Fixed: Change plan sometimes not updating the disk space quota of blogs;
– Fixed: Added edge case to domain mapping and the get_scheme function, to allow more flexibility to sub-domains installs using mapped domains;
– Fixed: Manual Gateway now checks if it should send the invoice on integration;
– Fixed: Incompatibility with Sitemap generators (thanks, Aron Prins =D);
– Fixed: Now WP Ultimo adds the original URL to the allowed cross-origin access array, to further prevent CORS issues;
– Fixed: Issue with sign-up redirects not being exact;
– Fixed: Relative time string on the Subscription page now support time spans larger than one year;
– Fixed: When the copy media option is disabled, we now remove the attachment posts related to each media file;
– Fixed: Small issue with creating new sites in some specific database environments;
– Fixed: Setup wizard link on the Mercator error message was broken;
– Fixed: We now check if the Stripe API was already loaded, to prevent fatal errors;
– Fixed: User creation now is timezone-sensitive, preventing delays in invoices and payments;
– Fixed: Spacing of integration buttons fixed;
– Improved: Multi-select fields on the Settings now can be sorted. That allow users to change the order of the allowed templates, for example;
– Improved: New option ‘display_force’ added to password fields. If checked, it adds a strength checker below the password field. More information: https://docs.wpultimo.com/knowledge-base/adding-a-strength-meter-to-password-fields/
– Improved: Form Fields helper function now gives the option to change the default value of the billing frequency field;
– Improved: Applied number_format to statistics widgets;
– Improved: “Instructions to Pay” field on Manual Gateway now supports is now a WP Editor field;
– Improved: Updated the Dutch language files – Thanks, Aron Prins;
– Improved: Moved the Domain Mapping and SSL settings to their own Settings Tab;
– Improved: SSL Settings Summary widget on the Settings page to help visualizing the SSL configuration;
– Added: Geo-location block added;
– Added: Restricted Content shortcode for plans and default content; More information: https://docs.wpultimo.com/knowledge-base/shortcodes/
– Added: New shortcode with the front-end URL of a user’s site for the create account template email (WP Ultimo -> Emails);
– Added: Option to enable/disable SSO with enabled as the default behavior;
– Added: Manual Gateway now displays link to a modal containing Instructions to Pay in the pending payment row in the Billing History widget;
– Added: Table Updater checker added, to make sure custom tables are always in sync with their latest version;

Release Notes – WP Ultimo 1.4.0: A step towards building the Ultimate Subscription-based Network Solution

Hi, everyone!

Version 1.4.0 is here and it represents a major step towards making WP Ultimo the all-in-one solution for building premium networks.

This version is all about the Sign-up Process.

It implements template overrides, a new API for adding steps and fields on the sign-up flow, a complete redesign of how the sign-up flow processes account creation, with two very handy functions, custom signup URL, and much more!

Sign-up Flow

Templates overrides

We realize the importance of making WP Ultimo as customizable as we can. Each and every one of our customers wants to provide a customized experience to their users. That being said, having dozens of premium services with the exact same sign-up page design (the WP Ultimo sign-up page) does little to offer that WOW feeling we all want to give potential clients.

In order to address this “lack of customization” problem, we implemented template overrides in WP Ultimo.

How does that work? It is simple. WP Ultimo now uses WordPress template hierarchy to selectively load view templates for its pages. It will first check your theme’s directory for template files and only if it does not find anything it will load the default templates shipped with it.

Don’t like that way the pricing tables look? Just copy the pricing-table.php from wp-ultimo/views/signup/pricing-table/pricing-table.php to your_active_theme_folder/wp-ultimo/signup/pricing-table, make some changes and voilá: WP Ultimo will load that file instead of the original one.

WP Ultimo supports template overriding for all the templates inside wp-ultimo/views/signup and wp-ultimo/views/emails, so you can have total control over the sign-up process and how your emails look. Overriding of widgets inside the dashboard should be added soon!

Customized Sign-up page URL

You can also change the URL of the sign-up page to anything you want, from now on, replacing the old wp-signup.php.

Hide plan selection step for single-plan sites

Many premium networks offer a single pricing option. For those networks, it does not really make sense to have a plan selection step during checkout. Networks admins now have an option to skip the plan selection step altogether if they only have one plan in the platform.

Steps/Fields API and Customizer Form Builder

In order to provide even more flexibility, we completely redesigned the way WP Ultimo generates and displays its steps during sign-up. The API for custom fields was simplified and we now have two functions to handle sign-up extensibility: wu_add_signup_step() and wu_add_signup_field(). No more hooking into 3 different hooks as it used to be.

As a quick example, adding a new signup step to gather the client’s first and last name is as simple as the code snippet shown below:

Saving and Retrieving Data

All the extra fields added to the sign-up flow get saved as default WordPress user meta data. That means that you don’t have to do anything else in order to save the contents of the extra fields you’ve added to the signup. It just works. This data can then be retrieved using standard WordPress functions like get_user_meta.

We also added a handy shortcode to display that information on the front-end: [wu_user_meta]. It takes a user_id argument (which you can leave blank as it defaults to the current site’s owner id) and meta_name, which describes the name of the meta info you want to retrieve. To get the user’s last name, for example, you would simply add a [wu_user_meta meta_name=”last_name”].

Another advantage of this approach is that WordPress already uses meta data to store major information about the user. If you create fields that match the specific keys used by WordPress, that information will get automatically updated. That means that in order to update the First and Last Name fields on the user profile’s page, you can just create two fields with the ids of first_name and last_name, like in the example above.

Customizer Support

Having a neat way of adding steps and fields with simple functions is helpful, but we would like to take this one step further. WordPress comes equipped with a powerful customization tool – the Customizer – and WP Ultimo should be able to take advantage of it by allowing network admins to add, rename and reorder steps and fields directly on the customizer with live preview support.

Version 1.4.0 starts to implement those functionalities with Step Renaming and Reordering. Everything else is in place and we should be able to release adding new steps and fields directly from the customizer in the next couple of versions, a few days from now. As you can see in the demo below, the Customizer picks up custom steps added via the functions described earlier.

Also, starting on version 1.4.0, all the styling options are mirrored on the customizer, meaning that you can now have instant feedback as you change colors and other elements.

This first version of our Customizer Support can be accessed via the button present on WP Ultimo Settings -> Styling.

Coupon Codes

Part of the coupon code handling was refactored in version 1.4.0. Network admins can now select between 3 different Coupon Code behaviors: disabled, coupon codes via URLs only (?coupon=CODE on the sign-up link) – where no field will be displayed on the sign-up form -, and allow coupon codes both via URL and via the sign-up field.ç

Copying the share link for the coupon code is much easier now and it can be done directly from the list table or on the Coupon edit’s page.

Important: There is a backwards-compatibility break in the coupon handling: URLs containing coupon codes are now yoursite.com/…/?coupon=CODEHERE and not yoursite.com/…/?coupon_code=CODEHERE, as it was in previous versions. If you have links with coupon codes somewhere you should update the URL.

Plain Emails

WP Ultimo now allows you to send emails on a plain email template. This is useful if you plan to use any third-party plugin for email template customization. And just to remember you, these email templates can be swapped using the new template overrides functionality we discussed above.

General Fixes

A number of small fixes were solved in version 1.4.0, including broken URL and paragraphs handlers on the Broadcast Emails. WP Ultimo now only displays broadcasts published after a user on the target group registered, preventing new users from being bombarded by all the previously published Broadcasts.

Under-the-hood improvements

We’ve compartmentalized the process of creating new accounts on WP Ultimo into two different stages: user creation and site creation. That change will allow us to add the option of letting clients create only users (with no associated sites, like WP Multisite normally allows them to) in the future. Logs on the system info page can also be deleted and downloaded now. Despite PHP inability to handle async processes, we managed to use a new technique to allow our screenshot scraper to work without taking your site down up to 80 templates at a time.

What’s next?

The priorities on our list are finishing up the customizer integration with full form-builder capabilities.

We run into some considerably large issues trying to implement single payments to our current gateway structure. That difficulty made it almost impossible to implement Extension Sales and Tax Settings (long waited features).

Our goal with the versions between 1.4.0 and 1.5.0 is to gradually rewrite those parts of the code (to ensure backwards compatibility), taking these new features into account.

That being said, we realize that we are well-beyond the promised date for the release of the Extension Sales feature on the Plugin and Theme Manager Add-on.

Due to that reason, if you bought the add-on solely because of that feature, in the hopes that it would arrive soon, just contact us via email and we will refund you on that add-on purchase even if more than 30 days have passed. 

Complete Changelog – Version 1.4.0 – 08/08/2017

– Added: Option to copy Coupon’s shareable links on the All Plans and Edit Plan pages;
– Added: Templates overrriding for sign-up and emails;
– Added: Helper function to create users with subscriptions: wu_create_user();
– Added: Helper function to create a new WP Ultimo network site: wu_create_site();
– Added: Fields and Steps API to the Sign-up flow;
– Added: Helper function to add new sign-up steps: wu_add_signup_step();
– Added: Helper function to add new sign-up fields: wu_add_signup_field();
– Added: Deleting users and sites now removes the mappings associated with those sites;
– Added: Option on the Email Settings to allow plain emails to be sent;
– Added: Logs are now downloadable and delectable;
– Added: Option to hide the Plan Selection step if there is just one plan available on the platform;
– Added: Three different behaviors added to Coupon Code: disabled entirely, only via URL code or via URL code and Sign-up field;
– Added: New shortcode wu_user_meta to retrieve user meta information on the front-end. Useful for retrieving information collected during sign-up using custom fields;
– Improved: Shortcode wu_plan_link updated to work with the new Sign-up codebase;
– Improved: WP Ultimo now checks for empty user role options to rebuild them if needed;
– Improved: WP Ultimo now only displays broadcasts published after a user on the target group registered. This prevents new users from being bombarded by all the previously published Broadcasts;
– Improved: Better template selection field;
– Improved: Refactorization of the Screenshot Scraper: it now can handle up to ~80 without crashing;
– Fixed: WU_Colors being added more than once;
– Fixed: Coupon validation functions was not checking for post type, only for post titles;
– Fixed: Fixed some broken elements on the Coupon Codes list table;
– Fixed: Links breaking on Broadcasted emails;
– Fixed: Missing variable declarations inside template_list and pricing_table shortcodes;
– Fixed: Broadcast emails now supports multiple lines;