Support for our multi-currency solution is growing
We are delighted to inform you that, day by day, more developers are recognising the importance of adding support for multi-currency environments to their plugins. When we released our plugin, the WooCommerce Currency Switcher, in 2013, we were pioneers in this field. At the time, not only there wasn’t any solution to make WooCommerce truly multi-currency, but there was nobody interested in developing one, either.
At the time, we were told by many developers that supporting multiple currencies was “impossible“, that there was no way to make the shop work correctly with more than one currency, and that no merchant would ever be interested in having such feature on their site. We are proud to say that we proved them wrong.
The ever-growing popularity of our Currency Switcher, and our other internationalisation solutions, such as Prices by Country, Tax Display by Country, and EU VAT Assistant, is now attracting the interest of many developers, who regularly contact us to see how they can extend their solutions to support multi-currency environments. As always, we are happy to help our colleagues in their endeavours, and pleased to see that so many want to join our project.
Two (and a half) more plugins join the multi-currency world
As the title indicates, we are happy to announce that two (and a half) more plugins have now been updated to support out multi-currency solution:
- WooCommerce Multiple Free Gift This plugin allows you to easily grant gifts to your customers, based on flexible, custom criteria. Rules such as “buy X, get Y free“, or “free gifts with any purchase” can be created easily, and applied to your customer’s cart automatically. We would like to thank its author, Ankit Pokhrel, for the good job he did, testing and extending his plugin together with our Currency Switcher to achieve maximum compatibility.
- WooCommerce Role Based Price This is a great plugin for the merchant who is dealing with different types of customers. As the name indicates, the Role Based Price plugin allows to sell products at different prices, depending on the role held by a customer. Wholesalers, consumers, VIP clients, they can all get their own, dedicated price.The integration with our Currency Switcher now allows you to enter such prices ineach of the currencies you enabled, greatly increasing your pricing options.We would like to thank Varun Sridharan for the effort he put into adding multi-currency support to his plugin. He is a great example of dedication, and his excellent work reflects that.
- WooCommerce Product Fees This is the “half” plugin that we mentioned at the beginning of the paragraph. The reason why we call it “half” will be clear shortly.The WooCommerce Product Fees plugin was released on the 25th August 2015 by Caleb Burks, a member of WooThemes Support Team and, less than 24 hours later, we had extended it with full support for multiple currencies. Our integration added support for per-currency product fees, with automatic conversions as a fallback, while still maintaining full backward compatibility with single-currency environments.The above took us less than two hours of work, which is a great indicator of how easy it is to interface with our multi-currency solution.
Why “half” plugin?
Unfortunately, the author of the WooCommerce Product Fees plugin informed that, although our integration worked perfectly, he deemed it not to be important enough to be included in the main release. He reckoned that it would add unnecessary complexity, therefore he decided to leave the integration out for the moment, and to review it at a later stage. We respectfully disagree with such decision, for two reasons:
- Our extension required very few changes in the original code, and it doesn’t make the plugin much more complex.
- It’s easier to “think multi-currency” from the beginning of a plugin’s development, rather than try to “retrofit” such feature in a more complex product months, or years later.
Of course, we do not want to enforce our vision and goals on anybody. We believe in collaboration, and freedom of choice is of utmost importance to us. We limited ourselves to explaining in detail why we believe that our integration should be part of the Product Fees plugin, and we will be happy to help Caleb in implementing it in the future. In the meantime, if you would like how a multi-currency aware of Product Fees plugin could work, you can get it from our Github fork: https://github.com/aelia-co/WooCommerce-Product-Fees.
Important: please note that we only extended the first version of the plugin, which might have now been updated by its author. If you download the latest version of the Product Fees plugin, you will probably have to re-apply our changes to it.
Acknowledgements
We do understand that, despite one’s best effort, it’s not always viable to extend an existing product to work seamlessly in a multi-currency environment, and we appreciate all the effort put into it, no matter the final outcome. We would like to take the opportunity to extend our thanks to all the developers who worked on an integration, whether they decided to complete it or not. Thanks to all of you for your continued support and contributions!
The Aelia Team
