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Product updates – Compatibility with the WooCommerce High Performance Order Tables (HPOS) feature

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The Aelia plugins are now compatible with WooCommerce High Performance Order Storage (HPOS) feature

We are happy to announce that, starting from the 11th of July, we will be releasing an updated version of all our plugins, which we tested for compatibility with the new HPOS feature provided by WooCommerce.

What is the HPOS feature?

Ad described in the WooCommerce documentation:

High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS) also previously known as “Custom Order Tables” is a solution that provides an easy-to-understand and solid database structure – specifically designed for eCommerce needs. It uses the WooCommerce CRUD design to store order data in custom tables – optimized for WooCommerce queries with minimal impact on the store’s performance.

This new feature aims at improving the performance of the checkout page, as well as the management of orders and generation of reports. Behind the scenes, the HPOS feature relies on new database tables that contain order data, structured in a more efficient way than the “legacy” post tables used by WordPress.

How does the HPOS feature affect the Aelia plugins?

Most of our plugins have been compatible with the HPOS feature for a while, as they rely on the functions provided by WooCommerce to access order data. These functions provide an abstraction layer, which ensures that plugins that call them will receive the expected data once the HPOS feature becomes the standard. We ran a series of tests, to be on the safe side, and we were able to confirm that the logic in our plugins works just fine with the new feature, as well as the legacy tables. We didn’t have to make significant changes to most of our solutions.

The most complex of our plugins, the Aelia Currency Switcher, required more work. That plugin is tightly integrated with the WooCommerce core, and, due to some design choices made to improve its performance, it had to access the database directly in a couple of cases. We rewrote the sections of the plugin that were affected by the upcoming changes and we implemented a fallback mechanism for sites that use the legacy tables. The switch between the two mechanisms is completely transparent to the user, and it occurs automatically when the HPOS feature is enabled or disabled. Thanks to this new architecture, the Currency Switcher is now compatible with the HPOS feature, while still retaining full compatibility with the legacy order tables.

Screenshots

Below you can find a few screenshots showing a couple of changes in the Aelia Currency Switcher interface. Although minor, they were an important step to improve the user experience and to ensure compatibility with the new pages (Edit Order, Orders List, Reports) introduced by the HPOS feature.

Aelia Currency Switcher - HPOS Compatibility - Orders list page

The new Orders List page shows the order totals in the original order currency and in the shop’s base currency, just like the legacy page did.

Aelia Currency Switcher - HPOS Compatibility - Orders import UI

The Currency Switcher now offers a simple interface to import the order data into the sales reports and analytics.

Aelia Currency Switcher - HPOS Compatibility - New install and upgrade logic

We rewrote the installation process to run in the background and process the data more efficiently.

Aelia Currency Switcher - HPOS Compatibility - Action Scheduler

The new installer included in the Currency Switcher relies on the robust Action Scheduler provided by WooCommerce.

What are the steps to enable the HPOS compatibility in the Aelia plugins?

The new versions of our plugins will enable the HPOS compatibility automatically, as soon as you install them. All our plugins retain full backward compatibility with the legacy order tables.

When will the updates become available?

As anticipated, we started rolling out the updates for our plugins on the 11th of July. You will see a notification in your WordPress dashboard when the new version of a plugin becomes available for your site.

💡 Important

The HPOS feature has been available since WooCommerce 7.1 and it changed slightly since its first release. Our tests indicate that the new feature is stable, and that our plugins work fine with it. However, we always recommend to test all the updates on a staging copy of your site first. We also recommend to take a full backup of your live site before enabling that feature on it, just to have an additional “safety net” in case of unexpected issue. If you encounter any issue, or come across an edge case scenario, please reach out to us, and we will look into it as soon as possible.

Conclusion

This new update will help your WooCommerce shop grow, thanks to the improved performance. The Aelia plugin will integrate seamlessly with the new High Performance logic and offer a smooth experience to both you and your customers.

Any questions?

As always, if you have any questions, or need assistance using our solutions, please feel free to contact us. We will be happy to assist you.

 

The Aelia Team

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Smart Coupons for WooCommerce, by StoreApps, now includes native support for the Aelia Currency Switcher

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Smart Coupons, by StoreApps, now with multi-currency support

The list of developers who join our efforts to bring full multi-currency support to WooCommerce has increased. The StoreApps Team, authors of the Smart Coupons plugin, have informed us that they added native support for our Aelia Currency Switcher to their product, starting from version 6.1.0, published on the 2nd of September, 2022.

Here’s an excerpt from the announcement published on the StoreApps website:

StoreApps Logo

Aelia Currency Switcher is quite an efficient and popular WooCommerce multi-currency plugin to display prices and accept payments in multiple currencies.

For store owners who use the Aelia Currency Switcher plugin, here’s a breakthrough update – Smart Coupons, the official WooCommerce coupons extension now integrates with Aelia multi-currency solution.

Your visitors would be able to view product prices, get discounts applied automatically, send and create gift cards/store credit in their own currency. And of course, make a purchase in that same currency.

 

You can find the full announcement here: StoreApps – Smart Coupons and Aelia Currency Switcher Integration. This new integration, paired with our popular multi-currency solution, will greatly simplify the management of multi-currency store credit. It will allow your shop to offer even more flexibility to your customers.

 

If you are looking for a flexible solution for gift cards and coupons, we would recommend to give the StoreApps plugin a try. You can get a copy of the Smart Coupons plugin from the WooCommerce shop: https://woocommerce.com/products/smart-coupons/. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the StoreApps Team: https://www.storeapps.org/support/contact-us/. They will be able to give you all the information you need and explain in detail how you can leverage the multi-currency features introduced in their latest version of their solution.

Of course, if you have any questions for us, e.g. to know more about our Currency Switcher, please feel free to reach out at any time, by using our contact form: https://aelia.co/contact. Just drop us a line, we are always happy to assist you.

 

The Aelia Team

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Aelia plugins – Performance improvements and PHP 8.2 compatibility

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In this post, we’re going to discuss the improvements we made to our products to deal with the breaking changes introduced by PHP 8.2, as well as the possible issues that you might encounter. If you’re not familiar with the PHP programming languages and the technical aspects of WordPress and WooCommerce, we recommend to involve your developer to fully understand the topics we will cover.

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WooCommerce Product-Addons by Plugin Republic now includes native support for the Aelia Currency Switcher

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Product-Addons by Plugin Republic, now with multi-currency support

A few days ago we have received excellent news from Gareth Harris, founder of Plugin Republic, which we are happy to share with you. Their popular Product Add-ons plugin now includes native support for our Aelia Currency Switcher. Without further do, here’s the announcement, straight from Gareth:

Plugin Republic Logo

Version 3.9.5 of WooCommerce Product Add-Ons by Plugin Republic now includes full integration with Aelia Currency Switcher for WooCommerce. This means that you can display prices for your add-on fields in different currencies.

The integration is seamless: you don’t need to change any settings, it works straight out of the box. When your users switch between currencies, all the add-on prices will automatically update. Any items that the user has already added to their cart will also update.

You can get a copy of Add-Ons Ultimate from https://pluginrepublic.com/wordpress-plugins/woocommerce-product-add-ons-ultimate/.

We’re excited to see another developer joining the “multi-currency movement”, in an effort to offer owners of WooCommerce shops maximum pricing flexibility. We recommend to give Gareth’s plugin a try, it could be just what you need to manage addons and options for your products. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact him: https://pluginrepublic.com/support/. He will be happy to answer your questions and assist you with the configuration of multi-currency addons on your site.

Of course, if you have any questions for us, you can also reach out, by using our contact form: https://aelia.co/contact. Just drop us a line, we are always happy to assist you.

 

The Aelia Team

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The new Aelia website is live, and we have great news!

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We launched our new website, with a new look and new features

At the beginning of October 2021, we went live with a new website, completely redesigned. The work took significantly longer than we expected, but the important thing is that we finally made it. The new website has a more modern look, a colour scheme that’s easier on the eyes, and it’s also significantly faster. Our tests indicate that it’s up to 30% faster than the previous one, but we will still work to optimise it, to offer you the best experience.

In addition to the look, we made an important change to how we distribute our products. We partnered with our friends at Freemius, and moved all our solutions to their platform. From now on, the Freemius service will take care of handling sales, licensing and distribution for all the Aelia plugins, giving us more time to focus on improving the solution that our customers grew up to know and trust over the years.

The advantages for our visitors and customers

The series of improvements we applied to our site will bring significant advantages. It would take time to list every single change, therefore we prepared a short summary, for your convenience.

New design

We improved the look of the website, using softer colours. This will make it easier to navigate the content and find the information you need. The new layout also includes better support for mobile devices. Mobile browsing is a key aspect of the Internet and, although most of our visitors and customers reach our site via a desktop, we wanted to cater to our “mobile friends” as well. As a further cosmetic touch, we replaced the old, ugly icons with much better ones.

Freemius integration

We moved all our products to an external service, called Freemius, to offer you a better user experience, right from the moment you choose to purchase one of our solutions. To explain the reason behind this decision, we would like to share a bit of “background story”.

As soon as we launched our first premium product, the Aelia Currency Switcher for WooCommerce, we faced a challenge that turned out to be harder than we thought. It was 2013, and neither WordPress, nor WooCommerce offered a reliable, scalable solution to manage software licences and distribute updates for our products. We tested some of the available plugins, but none of them worked too well for us. In some cases, we even received a disgruntled response from the author of a plugin, when we asked about the feature set, so that was a clear roadblock.

Our first solution – The Aelia Licensing System

Due to the lack of a suitable solution, we opted to implement our own licensing system, starting from scratch. For the last couple of years, our Aelia Licensing System has been handling licences and serving automatic updates to thousands of our customers. This worked fine for us, until we had to face some important challenges:

  1. When we first designed our licensing system, we deliberately left renewals as a manual operation, because that was what our customers asked. That request changed fairly quickly, and nowadays most of our customers would like to have licences that renew automatically.
  2. Our customer base grew faster than we expected. Our in-house licensing system, which was still working fine, risked not to be able to handle all the traffic it received.
  3. An increasing number of our customers asked us to provide trial versions of our products. We are not fans of the idea of offering limited versions of plugins, that don’t reflect the true capabilities of the paid product, therefore we had to find a way to implement some sort of “time limited trial”.
  4. In 2021, Brexit finally became effective, introducing new rules to sell to UK consumers (i.e. customers who are not registered for VAT). Merchants are required to charge VAT to all UK customers who don’t have a valid UK VAT number. At the same time, the same merchants can’t charge VAT unless they have a UK VAT number, which we don’t have. Registering for VAT in the UK would have introduced a significant amount administrative costs, that we could not sustain. Due to that, the only viable option left to us was to block sales to UK consumers. Needless to say, this caused us to be unable to offer our products to such customers.

Our new choice – Freemius

With so many different aspects to handle, we realised that we could not longer rely on our own resources. Due to that, we tested the Freemius platform, and found that it allowed us to address all the above, automatically. Their service handles automatic renewals, is fast, and it can serve customers from the EU, the UK and abroad. This allows us to reach a broader audience, remain fully compliant with VAT regulations and save a significant amount of paperwork.

The Freemius platform offers our customers a modern, responsive and performing user interface. Thanks to that, our clients can find what they need, quickly and easily. On top of that, the work we did for the integration can also benefit our fellow developers!

If you’re a plugin developer interested in Freemius, we have something for you

The Freemius platform offers a simple integration guide. We could have just followed the instructions anded add a purchase link on our website, manually, on each product page. However, as Engineers, we like to automate these aspects, so we came up with a solution. We prepared a Freemius Integration plugin , which allows to link a WooCommerce shop to the Freemius service. Some of the key features:

  1. Manage product prices, from WooCommerce, and update them in Freemius automatically. This feature also works with WooCommerce’s variations to allow you to configure as many prices as you like, in any combination. For example, you can create monthly, annual, lifetime payment options, for one site, or multiple sites, and link each one to a variation.
  2. Manage and synchronise product prices in multiple currencies. The Freemius Integration is also fully compatible with our Aelia Currency Switcher. This feature allows you to synchronise, and keep up to date, the product prices all the currencies supported by Freemius. You can enter the prices manually, directly in WooCommerce. or let them be updated automatically whenever exchange rates change.
  3. Display a smart widget to allow your customers to purchase your products. You can use the shortcode provided by the Freemius Integration and let it take care of showing the available options, with each price, to your prospective customers. Simp
  4. ly drop the shortcode anywhere you like, and it will display a user friendly purchase interface to your customers.

If you wish to see the Freemius Integration in action, you can simply visit one of our product pages. You can find the purchase widget towards the bottom of the page, or simply click on the “buy plugin” button to scroll right down to it.

Interested in the Freemius Integration for WooCommerce?

If you would like to know more about the Freemius Integration for WooCommerce, please feel free to contact us. We will be happy to share more details about it, and collect your feedback and feature requests, in preparation for its release to the public.

 

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Important news about Currency Switcher for Easy Digital Downloads (updated June 2021)

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At Aelia, we aim to offer the best quality of products and services to our customers. We review our performance on a regular basis, and prepare a strategy to ensure that the high standards we set are met, or exceeded. One of the steps of the performance review is the analysis of areas that need improvement, as well as products that, for any reason, aren’t performing as well as expected. When such products are identified, we review past performance and take one of the following course of action, for each product:

  1. Evaluate the market demand of the product, as well as the challenges that may arise in the future, in relation to the product support.
  2. Compare the demand with our available resources, to ensure that we can dedicate sufficient time, to each product, to offer consistent results in terms of quality.
  3. Depending on the result of #2, take one of the following actions:
    1. If the demand is sufficient and can be met by our existing resources, adjust their allocation accordingly.
    2. If the demand is sufficient, but we have insufficient resources, prepare a plan to increase our availability.
    3. If the demand is insufficient to cover the resources dedicated to the product, we try to transfer it to a 3rd party who might be interested in it. In some cases, we might have to retire the product altogether.

During the reviews performed between 2018 and 2020, we identified a couple of products that have been underperforming. One of them appeared in each analysis, and it’s our Currency Switcher for Easy Digital Downloads. The market demand for that solution didn’t grow as we expected, despite our efforts. In addition to that, the demand for our WooCommerce solutions grew significantly, to the point that they become the main focus of our business. As a result, we find ourselves in the difficult position of not being able to dedicate sufficient resources to Easy Digital Downloads, and the Currency Switcher we developed for it.

Future plans for the EDD Currency Switcher

Through the course of 2020, we contacted a couple of parties who showed interest in the possibility of acquiring our Currency Switcher for Easy Digital Downloads and maintain it in the future. Although we’ve been asked not to disclose their names, we’re currently discussing with them how the transfer could take place, as well as the work involved in promoting, maintaining and supporting the existing solution. We hope that we can reach an agreement soon, so that the EDD Currency Switcher can continue to exist under another brand. Of course, we also have to take into account the possibility that the negotiations might fail. In such case, we will have to retire the Currency Switcher for Easy Digital Downloads.

Effective immediately, we will no longer be able to offer new or renewal licences, for the EDD Currency Switcher. Of course, we will keep providing support to all the customers with an active licence, until the end of their subscription. We will also release maintenance fixes, but we won’t release major updates for the plugin.

This was a difficult decision to take, but we came to the conclusion that we have to focus on what we can do best, to ensure that we can keep our offers to the high standards that our customers have come to expect from us. Our business evolved almost exclusively around solutions for WooCommerce, and we would like to hand over the portion related Easy Digital Downloads to someone who can dedicate to it the time it deserves.

Update, March 2021: we will keep offering the EDD Currency Switcher for the time being.

Update, June 2021: following a technical review Easy Digital Downloads 3.0, we came to the conclusion that the EDD Currency Switcher would need a significant amount of changes to become compatible with the new major release. Unfortunately, that is not a viable option, from a business perspective. Due to that, we can no longer guarantee that we will be able to update the EDD Currency Switcher to support EDD 3.0. Sadly, we had to go back to our original decision, and we suspended the sale of the EDD Currency Switcher indefinitely. You can find a summary of the reasons behind this decision and the future plans for the Currency Switcher below.

Summary (tl;dr)

  1. Our performance reviews indicated that our Currency Switcher for Easy Digital Downloads has been underperforming, with its sales not even covering the day to day support costs.
  2. Due to the low demand and resource availability, we’re no longer in the position to dedicate sufficient attention to the EDD Currency Switcher. A technical analysis of EDD 3.0 also indicated that the EDD Currency Switcher would need significant changes, to become compatible with the new major release of Easy Digital Downloads. The poor sale performance of the EDD Currency Switcher don’t allow us to allocate sufficient resources to do that.
  3. We’re currently discussing the possibility of transferring the EDD Currency Switcher to other developers, who could be interested in maintaining it. Should the negotiations be unsuccessful, we will have to retire the product.
  4. We will keep supporting the EDD Currency Switcher for customers who have an active licence. We won’t be able to offer new licences, or renew existing licences.
  5. For the time being, we will only release maintenance updates for the EDD Currency Switcher. We don’t plan to release any major update. The last version of Easy Digital Downloads supported by the Currency Switcher will be 2.9.x.

What to do if you’re using the EDD Currency Switcher

If you purchased a licence for the EDD Currency Switcher, the following will apply.

  1. You can keep using the EDD Currency Switcher. The plugin is still working fine and, as anticipated, we will honour existing licences until their expirations, and keep providing support and bug fixes. If the negotiations with the 3rd party developers will be successful, they will take care of updating the Currency Switcher in the future and provide the support service afterwards.
  2. You can keep using the EDD Currency Switcher, while planning the switch to an alternative solution. You can find a list of the available extensions on the Easy Digital Downloads website: https://easydigitaldownloads.com/3rd-party-extensions/
  3. If you have some developers who can take care of technical aspects, you can  keep using the EDD Currency Switcher, and they can maintain it for you. All our code is 100% open source and documented, to make it easier for other developers to work on it. If they have any questions, they can also contact us directly. We’re always happy to share our knowledge and experience.
  4. Since this is an extraordinary scenario, we extended our money back guarantee for the EDD Currency Switcher. If you purchased your licence on or after the 1st of March 2021, you can request a full reimbursement until the 30 June 2021.

Of course, if you have any question about the Currency Switcher for Easy Digital Downloads, or the support plans, please feel free to contact us. We will be ready to answer and clarify any doubt you might have.

If you’re a developer and you think that could be interested in acquiring our product, we would also invite you to get in touch. We will be happy to share all the information about the product, and discuss with you the terms of the transfer. 👍

The Aelia Team