New product section open: addons for WooCommerce Currency Switcher

We are happy to announce that we opened a new product section in our shop, containing add-ons for the popular Currency Switcher for WooCommerce 2.0.x/2.1.x. This section will contain small (and not-so-small) plugins which will extend the already flexible Currency Switcher, adding integration and compatibility with 3rd party products.

Why this decision?

The Currency Switcher is our most popular product, and more users are enquiring about its compatibility with 3rd party products. As we explain in our knowledge base, the plugin was designed to work with “plain” WooCommerce and its basic features, as covering each and every 3rd party plugin and theme would be practically impossible, due to the amount of them. Despite this difficulty, in the past month with greatly extended the plugin flexibility, making it compatible with many popular products.  This, however, came at a price: the Currency Switcher started to become larger and more complex, with the added risk of making support and maintenance more difficult and expensive.

We also realised that most of our customers do not use many of the 3rd party products for which support was added, and would be happy with a more lightweight plugin. After analysing all these elements, we came to the conclusion that going “modular” was the way to go: rather than adding more and more features into the main plugin, we will split them into smaller sub-plugins, which will be easier to maintain and can be installed only when needed. This will also allow us to keep the price for the Currency Switcher low, rather than increasing it with the amount of features.

What does this mean for our customers?

With our new strategy, we aim to reach several important objectives:

• Backward compatibility

  Maintaining backward compatibility is part of our policy, therefore you can expect the Currency Switcher to keep working as it already does. Any integration with 3rd party plugins and themes that is now part of the main plugin will stay in its place for the time being, until we will manage to gracefully migrate them into separate plugins.

• Increased flexibility and manageability

  Splitting the integrations into lightweight sub-plugins will allow us to keep each of them light and easy to manage. Troubleshooting will also be easier, as each Currency Switcher add-on can be disabled independently from the main plugin.

• No increase in the price of the Currency Switcher

  As explained, adding too many features to the Currency Switcher started making it harder to maintain and increased the cost of supporting it. To avoid having to increase the price of the plugin, we will give the choice to our customers to download most of the Currency Switcher add-ons completely free of charge, or to pay a small fee to cover support. This will allow our customers to get the add-ons at no cost, use them on their system (without limitation as per GPL) and eventually pay for support only when needed.

We are very excited about this news, and we think that this decision will contribute to keep the high quality that you expect from our products and services. Any feedback is welcome, so feel free to speak your mind in the comment section below!