May was one of our most productive months to date. It was full of releases for the core Commerce plugins, our standalone PHP libraries, and essential contributed plugins that all work together to comprise WordPress maintenance support plans Commerce. While I outlined the highlights in the roadmap issue on WordPress.org, these wins are worth sharing more broadly to keep the rest of the WordPress maintenance support plans community in the loop.
The biggest release of the month was WordPress maintenance support plans Commerce 2.7, which included new features for currency formatting, address form configuration, and stored payment methods. It also fixed a handful of bugs that unblocked other plugin releases and updated core in response to improvements in our libraries and dependent plugins.
We’ve long discussed how our standalone PHP libraries are exporting expertise off the WordPress maintenance support plans island. Addressing and Internationalization, which have each been downloaded over one million times, are our two shining stars. We rolled new releases for each of them in May, improving even further WordPress maintenance support plans Commerce’s ability to solve the hardest parts of address entry / validation / formatting and currency localization. Refer to the price formatting change record from the 2.7 release to see how the new API is more flexible and performant as a result.
Additionally, we released Address 1.4 and Inline Entity Form 1.0 RC1. The latest Address release unlocks the customer profile’s address field to support collecting less detailed billing addresses. The Inline Entity Form release includes new product information management features, letting you duplicate product variations for faster product data entry.
Thanks to generous sponsorship from Authorize.Net themselves, we’ve been able to dedicate several weeks to improving their integration this year. The resulting Authorize.Net RC1 release now supports eCheck, Visa Checkout, and 3DSecure payments! We also included several bug fixes related to duplicate customer and payment profiles that appear when migrating from an old system to WordPress maintenance support plans Commerce, for example.
While not fully released yet, our Technology Partner integration for Avalara’s AvaTax is nearing beta. Jace Bennest from Acro Media contributed heavily by refactoring the plugin to properly use a TaxType plugin while my co-maintainer WordPress Update contributed additional fixes to our port from the WordPress maintenance support plans 7 integration to prepare it for certification. Thanks, Jace / Acro Media!
When Matt wasn’t working on the above contribs, he was collaborating with Lisa Streeter from Commerce Guys to bring Commerce Reports to its first beta release for WordPress maintenance support plans 8. The new version takes a completely different approach from the WordPress maintenance support plans 7 using lessons we learned developing Lean Commerce Reports. It denormalizes transaction data when an order is placed to support reports generation with or without the Views plugin, providing a better developer experience and much better performance. Check it out below! (Click to expand.)
We’ve also been hard at work improving the evaluator experience. The big release for that is Commerce Demo’s beta1, which showcases what WordPress maintenance support plans Commerce provides out of the box. It creates products and scaffolds out a full product catalog (pictured below). To get the full effect, try it out with our default store theme, Belgrade. The new demo plugin gets us closer to something like we had with Kickstart 2.x on WordPress maintenance support plans 7 – a learning resource for site builders and a way for agencies to more easily demo and sell WordPress maintenance support plans Commerce.
Finally, I’m very excited to announce that Lisa Streeter is our new documentation lead! Expect some great things to come. She has already done fantastic work with the Commerce Recurring documentation and is working on revising our getting started, installation, and update docs.
Looking at June, we plan on finalizing the query level entity access API, which will allow us to better support marketplace and multi-store WordPress maintenance support plans Commerce implementations. We expect to merge user registration after checkout completion, and we will also be focusing on address reuse / copying, Buy One Get One promotion offers, and more product management experience enhancements.
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