WP Ultimo Beta 3 available

tl;dr: beta 3 is out and can be downloaded here; new builds with update posts every Monday at the end of the day; cool add-ons released.

Hey there. How are you doing?

This post is to announce that the beta 3 of WP Ultimo 2.0 is out. This build marks an important change of status.

Although still not entirely production ready, this build is a go for new networks!
So if you wanted to get started but was afraid of possible breaking changes in the future, you can start to push forward.

From now on, any changes to the database structure (if and when necessary) will be done via our database migration tool built right into the core plugin, meaning that nothing will break and no action will be required to keep the database up-to-date while development progresses.

For live networks running on 1.10.13, we still strongly recommend waiting for the stable, just to be on the safe side.

To provide some constancy, previsibility, and better transparency, starting next week, we’ll have a new release with the work done every Monday by the end of the day. That will force us to keep you all updated with posts like this and allow you to know when a new build is going to be out without the need to ask around, wait, or speculate.

The new beta can be download here: https://wpultimo.com/download-beta/

As always, feedbacks and bug reports are welcome here, but please give it a quick search on the boards to make sure the issue was not already reported (in which case you can simply vote on it to let us know that you are also experiencing the same issue).

In this build

Stripe, Stripe Checkout, PayPal, and more

Finished implementations of the gateways officially supported on 1.10.13: Stripe and PayPal. Stripe is present in two flavors, embedded form (credit card fields right into the checkout form) and via Stripe Checkout (their hosted solution). Our Stripe Checkout implementation now also supports alternative payment methods (such as iDeal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and more). These options are in the process of being added to the embedded Stripe form as well.

All the gateways present support sending tax info to the gateway. On Stripe, for example, tax rates are automatically created on Stripe for you, to make life easier.

The payments management screen now allows for issuing refunds (that are automatically processed by the attached payment gateway).

For developers, we radically simplified the base class for gateways. This means that implementing new gateways should be as easy as it gets. For customers using the PayFast integration previously released, we plan to have an updated version of that add-on – modified to work with the new system – by next Monday. Monday is also the day we plan to have the first iteration of the WooCommerce integration out for initial testing.

Mollie and GoCardless support are also in the works, with first iterations scheduled to be released next week as well.

Auto-renew

Super admins now can give customers a choice between turning auto-renew for their memberships or not during checkout. This feature is opt-in and needs to be activated on WP Ultimo -> Settings -> Payments. By default, the option is hidden at checkout, and auto-renew is forced if the gateway select supports it.

SSO and Domain Mapping

This build contains a new implementation of the Single Sign-On code to auto-login customers and admins as they navigate between sites with different domains. The previous implementation ceased to work as browsers increased the security around cross-domain cookie access (for a good reason). It also includes small tweaks to the Domain Mapping redirect rules that are a bit more performant.

Rollbacks

WP Ultimo core now has its own roll back tool. It will allow admins to quickly revert down to a previous WP Ultimo version if something goes wrong after an update.

Add-on: Support Agents

Super admins are all-powerful in WordPress, and that can be problematic when growing your team to add support agents and such to your network. We’re releasing the first production-ready version of our Support Agents add-on, which allows you to add a special type of WordPress user, with granular control over what they can do both inside WordPress default Network Admin pages and within WP Ultimo.

Add-on: Captcha

Bots are getting smarter every day and the default honeypot strategy that works so well for us in the version 1.X days might not be enough once your network grows enough to become the target of spam attacks. To address this, we’re releasing the first version of our Captcha add-on. It includes support to Google’s reCaptcha (V2 and V3), as well as hCaptcha.

Add-on: Plugin and Theme Manager

We’re also releasing the first iteration of the all-new version of Plugin and Theme Manager. It’s a complete rewrite of the add-on, made to be more performant and flexible, with some cool features coming down the road (such as additional page designs for the Theme and Plugin pages, for example).

All of these add-ons can be installed directly from WP Ultimo -> Settings -> Add-ons, but require a Pro or Lifetime license tier.

Other Fixes

This build also addresses lots and lots of under-the-hood/engine problems, like properly setting default values when saving, better compatibility with offload plugins, and more.