A quarter of a year gone by. In India, March 31 marks the end of the financial year, so in many ways, it’s a new year for us all over again.

March 2019 was a month of mixed moods – colorful, productive, stressful and more. We met the first half with in shock, as a security vulnerability in the Abandoned Cart for WooCommerce, resolved over a month ago, right after it was first reported in February, had made its way to news portals.

We are once again, extremely sorry for the oversight. You can read our full statement on the said issue, here. 

Here are the other things that happened in March 2019.

Technical Updates

Abandoned Cart Plugin

Version 8.0 of the Abandoned Cart Plugin for WooCommerce was released on March 8th, 2019. It was an important update and included some new features, major performance related fixes along with some bug fixes. Some of them are as follows:

New Features

• The plugin is now compatible with the Checkout pages created using Aero: Custom WooCommerce Checkout Pages plugin
• It now supports Polylang, where the emails will be sent in the language the cart was abandoned
• The email templates are now further customizable, and can be set based on a particular set of rules based on the products present in the cart
• A revamped Abandoned Cart dashboard for better user experience

Tweaks

• We have merged the Abandoned Orders tab and Recovered Orders tab; now all the Orders can be viewed from a single place
• There is now a filter for Unsubscribed Carts on the Abandoned Orders listing page. We have also added a dropdown Abandoned Orders page to filter different statuses of carts
• The plugin now has the WPML API included, so you don’t have to fetch translations from the database directly

Bugs Fixed

• Fixed an issue where the Order notes were getting displayed twice for recovered orders.
• When Add to cart action was ajaxified, at that time the behavior of popup was conflicting. This is now fixed.
• Fixed an issue where the variations were not showing correctly in CSV and Print files exported.
• Fixed an issue where the attributes were getting displayed twice on the Abandoned Orders page.

Booking & Appointment Plugin 

Version 4.14.0 of the plugin was released on March 20th, 2019, and included key enhancements and fixes to several issues. Some of them are as follows:

Enhancements: 

• The View Booking page speed was optimized
• New filters for Google Calendar Sync, Search Widget, Fixed Block Booking were introduced
• All users are now listed in the customer dropdown on the Create Booking page

Issues Fixed: 

A total of 17 issues were fixed. Some of fixes include:

• On the View Bookings page, the Customer field would remain empty if the First and Last name were not set in the billing address
• The product page would continuously load if the date added for the booking had already passed
• The date in the booking field was being shown in English even another language is set in Booking -> Settings -> Global Booking Settings -> Language option
• Bookings were not reallocated to other products when the booking date and time from the My Account page was rescheduled

Product Delivery Date Plugin

Version 3.1 was released on March 28th, 2019, with a few tweaks and bug fixes.

Tweaks 

• Some space was added between the Add to cart button and the Delivery date form box.
• In addition to the delivery calendar showing up when the cursor focus is in the field, the calendar will now also load one clicks the calendar icon

Bug Fixes

• The Product Delivery Date settings were not loading when Polylang Pro plugin was active. This has been fixed
• The Minimum delivery preparation time was not getting applied when the Delivery Type was set to a fixed delivery period. This has been resolved
• A couple of strings in the PO files were missing. They have now been added
• Past delivery dates were appearing when Delivery Type was set to fixed delivery period. This is fixed

Custom Order Status for WooCommerce

Version 1.4.6 was released towards the month-end, on March 27th, 2019. Two new merge tags, {first_name} and {last_name}, were added for email content.

The issues fixed were:

• Emails sent by the plugin for status change would display the status slug instead of the name
• An uninstall.php file was added to cleanup the settings when the plugin is deleted

Tweaks

• Modified the plugin to not accept slugs already present in the terms table as it conflicts with WooCommerce
• Modified the plugin to show the Mark Order Complete icon in WooCommerce->Orders->Actions column for custom status orders

Currency per Product for WooCommerce

Version 1.4.5 of the Currency per Product for WooCommerce was released on March 28th, 2019, with the following fixes:

• The license key was not getting activated under License link in WooCommerce -> Settings -> Currency Per Product tab with the version 1.4.4. This is fixed now.
• Prices for bookable products from WooCommerce Bookings plugin were not converted to the default currency when ‘Convert to Shop default currency (and set cart and checkout behavior separately)’ option is selected for Shop Behaviour setting. This is fixed now
• The prices for the selected currency for the bookable products were shown as 0 on the Shop page when ‘Add original price in shop’ option is checked. This is fixed now
• A fatal error was shown on the Shop page for Variable products when visited as Wholesale customer added from Wholesale Customers For Woo plugin. This is fixed now.

For full changelogs, please visit the respective plugin pages on our website.

The Tyche Book Club

Continuing our bi-monthly book club, we met twice in March under a different format. Previous book clubs had us reading out of the same book each time. This month, we let everyone pick their own books, based on interest and reading levels, and discussed them when we met.

This proved to be effective. From books on UI, on spirituality that teaches one to trust the cycle of karma, and fiction such as murder mysteries, to self help books on making money work for you, and religo-history book on how Shiva’s temples came to be, the diversity was richer and everyone read with a keener interest.

In the second session of the month, each member even read out a few passages from their respective books. After two months of figuring out how to make the club work, we think we have found the formula. Family of the team have also taken to reading and we could not be happier!

New Blog Posts to Check Out

There were several amazing posts, both technical and otherwise, were written over the last month. Check them out:

1. Busted: Myths about WooCommerce, which tried to look into some of the common misconceptions of using the platform for your business
2. See what Underground Reptiles had to say about our Order Delivery Date plugin
3. Learn how to add charges or discounts for different payment methods for WooCommerce in this post
4. You can remove the Last Name field from the My Account page in WooCommerce. Check this post to know how
5. You can also make WooCommerce external product links open in a new tab

Happy Holi!

And of course, the highlight of the month was celebrating holi at the office. It was a green, water-free holi, but just as entertaining, as everyone coloured the others crazy with gulaal and other powedered colours. Check out some of the pictures from the day:

And that’s a wrap. Here’s to the next 30 days. Cheers, everyone!