Yup, we have been super quiet so far this year, not much content out, not many updates pushed out… but hear me out.
We’ve been SUPER busy behind the scenes.
We have smashed out support for WooCommerce subscriptions. This one has been a big one for us. For now, we have three plugins with support for this, we are working closely with the payment providers to make this the best integration on the market.
Not only that, but we also added support for PBL (Pay By Link) to these three plugins; this is a more simple way for doing custom orders. While we have supported MOTO (Mail Order/Telephone Order) payments for some time, I feel like PBL is the better option here. You no longer need to have the customer on the phone while you use their card details.
Two big features just about ready to see the world and be used by our customers, the change logs for these three plugins is fairly big, with some other tweaks and improvements. To say that we are excited to see this live is an understatement. Once we do hit the switch, we should be able to roll these out to the others fairly quickly.
So watch this space!
Now, I know that we are now in the third month of the year, and you might be thinking that that is all we have been doing…
No, there has been more.
Documentation – We have been told many times that our docs are great, and the team have been hard at work working on guides for the two new features above. We also plan to try to break up our docs a little more. We are going to do this by feature, so it is clear from the main doc pages to help you find the guides needed for the feature you wish to set up.
Testing – Just thinking back a few years, all the testing before we published an update was done manually. This was fine when we didn’t have many features and plugins to look after. But as we grew, it was not the best use of time for us as a small team. Last year we signed up for a SaaS (Software as a Service) which would allow us to do testing (payments, refunds, wizard etc), while this did cost a fair bit each month, the time saving was great. We did hit some issues with some plugins not being able to use this platform.
So. This year, we switched to Codeception to handle all our testing. It’s been a bit of leg work, but it has slotted into our development workflow. We are massive fans of GitHub Actions, and having Codeception run in our workflow has meant we have been able to build and test updates much faster.
Automation is huge for us, one of our deployment flows looks a little something like this:
- Push to repo
- Some WP checks (.POT check, WP version check and a few other bits)
- Build Zip file
- FTP to demo website
- Run tests on demo website
- If tests pass, then push to Freemius
We also have auto tests for all our plugins running every night, this allows us to catch any issues before we start work in the morning.
All throughout this process, the team here are updated in our Slack channel.
It is safe to say that testing has become a huge part of what we do here.
Right then… Best I get back to work.
I hope you enjoyed this little peek behind the curtain here. When we are quiet, we are working on something cool.
Subscriptions and PBL is coming for Lloyds, Authipay and First Data, hopefully next week once we have done our final round of tests.
Thanks again for all the support.
Aaron, Angela, Catrina, Charles, Mark & Babs
