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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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A recommendation from our colleagues at Ays Pro Plugins

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Aelia Currency Switcher review – Recommended as the first choice

Our colleagues at Ays Pro Plugins contacted us a while ago, while they were conducting a survey about the best multi-currency plugins available for WooCommerce. Understandably, considering the number of solutions currently of the market, it took them a while, but the results are finally in. Our Aelia Currency Switcher came out right on top. From their summary:

In summary, the Aelia Currency Switcher for WooCommerce is a must-have tool for any online store looking to expand its global reach and boost sales. With its powerful features, easy setup, top-class support service, and decades of software engineering experience behind it, the Aelia Currency Switcher is a reliable and effective solution for any online store looking to cater to customers from around the world.

You can find the full review here: Ays Pro Plugins – Best WooCommerce Multi Currency Plugins of 2023. We’re delighted to see that our efforts are appreciated by clients and colleagues alike. We will strive to continue offering top class solutions to our clients, as well as unparalleled customer service. As always, we are open to collaboration with other developers who wish to join us in our efforts. Together, we can make the WooCommerce world the best place to run an online shop.

 

Sponsored content

Introducing the Quiz Maker plugin for WordPress

The Ays Pro Plugins Team offer an interesting suite of products for WordPress, tailored towards websites that offer study courses and need to run quizzes or collect feedback from the students. You can find the full suite of products here: https://ays-pro.com/wordpress. From that list, we chose a plugin that impressed us for its feature set, the WordPress plugin for Quiz.

Quiz Maker - Header

Why use a quiz plugin on your site?

If you run a site for students, or even just for fun, to tease your audience, it’s important to have an easy way to create engaging questionnaires. The Quiz Maker is a great tool for creating different types of quizzes, quickly and easily. The plugin allows you to build several types quizzes, like the following:

  • Personality tests
  • Scored quizzes
  • IQ tests
  • Assessment tests
  • Multiple-choice quizzes
  • Trivia quizzes
  • Buzzfeed quizzes

Abd more. The Quiz Maker offers extensive styling features, to make the interface blend smoothly with your existing site. The user interface is simple to use, responsive, and configurable.

What about cheaters?

Cheating is as old as quizzes. In fact, it was probably invented a few minutes after the first questionnaire. To prevent cheating during online exams and tests, the Quiz Maker allows you to create timer-based exams., which make it harder for a dishonest test taker to search for answers. The quiz plugin also include a content protection function to deter copying.

With great answers should come great rewards

Students like to be rewarded for reaching a good score. The Quiz Maker allows you to send customisable certificates to your examinees after they pass a test. A certificate can be automatically emailed to test takers, and it can also be used as an opportunity to generate leads to bring them back to your site. In addition to that, you can also publish a chart with the results, to give your audience an immediate understanding of how well they did. The good old “bragging rights” can be another powerful tool to keep your audience engaged.

If you need to charge fees for a test, Quiz Maker got you covered

Thanks to PayPal integration with the Quiz Maker plugin, you can create paid quizzes and questionnaires and apply the necessary fees before your students take their test.

Robust integrations bring your quizzes farther

The Quiz Maker includes numerous integrations, including Google Sheets, MailChimp, PayPal, Zapier, Stripe, ActiveCampaign, WooCommerce, Campaign Monitor, and Slack. You can use them to share your quizzes, invite your users to participate to them, or measure their engagement. The extensive integration features have you covered.

In conclusion, the Quiz Maker plugin is an ideal too for anyone who needs to cater to an audience of students, or users who like to have fun with entertaining quizzes. If you have any questions, the Ays Pro Plugins Team will be happy to answer them, and review any feature request you might have.

 

Thanks again for reading, and see you soon with more exciting news!

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 Aelia Shipping Pricing Addon is now included in the Aelia Currency Switcher

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We are pleased to announce that the Aelia Shipping Pricing plugin, originally distributed as a separate addon for the Aelia Currency Switcher, will been bundled with the main plugin starting from version 4.11.x of the Currency Switcher. We took the decision of merging the two plugins after reviewing our sale statistics. The vast majority of our customers use both plugins together, therefore it made sense to release them as a single product.

This new distribution model brings several advantages:

  1. Easier maintenance. The licence for the Currency Switcher covers both the main plugin and the addon, so you won’t have to remember to renew two of them.
  2. Easier updates. The Shipping Pricing addon will “follow” the Currency Switcher at every update, reducing the chance of issues caused by old versions that were not updated.
  3. Lower price. The Aelia Currency Switcher with the Shipping Pricing addon included is cheaper than the current price of the two separate plugins.

What this means for our customers

If you’re using the Aelia Currency Switcher with the Shipping Pricing Addon as a separate plugin, you will soon see a notice informing you that the addon has been bundled with the Currency Switcher. The notice will look like the following:

The plugin “Aelia Shipping Pricing for Currency Switcher” is now included with the Aelia Currency Switcher

This plugin is now included in the Aelia Currency Switcher and no longer has to be installed separately. You can go to the Plugins page, then disable and remove plugin “Aelia Shipping Pricing for Currency Switcher”. Its features will remain available, as they were before.

As indicated in the message, you will just have to go to WordPress Admin > Plugins and disable the Shipping Pricing Addon. The features originally provided by that plugin will remain available via the Currency Switcher, exactly as they were before.

If you’re using only the Currency Switcher, you won’t have to do anything. You will just find the new features in the WooCommerce > Settings > Shipping page, after opening a shipping zone. Below you can find some screenshots of the Shipping Pricing Addon in action:

How this affects your licences

Your licence for the Aelia Currency Switcher will allow you to download the new version, including the Shipping Pricing features, automatically. When the licence for the Shipping Pricing addon  will expire, you will not have to do anything. In fact, you can simply delete the Shipping Pricing addon from your site after updating the Currency Switcher. As indicated, the main plugin now includes all the features from the shipping addon.

Any questions?

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us, we ill be ready to assist you.

The Aelia Team