This release includes a handful of smaller but useful features as well as a number of bugfixes.
Feature: Auto-complete orders for virtual products
By default, when someone purchases through WooCommerce, the purchaser’s Order goes into “Processing” status, signifying that the site owner should do some sort of fulfillment of the order, like putting a product into a box and mailing it out. The site owner would then manually mark the Order as “Completed” to show that it’s been fulfilled.
This workflow doesn’t make sense for non-physical products like subscriptions, memberships, or donations, where the purchase is automatically and immediately fulfilled by the system and no human intervention is needed. We’ve added a new setting to WooCommerce virtual products: “Auto-complete orders”. When enabled, this setting will skip the “Processing” status and automatically put new Orders into the “Completed” status. This setting is enabled by default on virtual products, so you shouldn’t need to do anything to get the benefits of this feature.
Feature: New option to skip Campaign setup during Reader Activation onboarding
The Reader Activation flow in the Engagement section of the Newspack section in WordPress admin has a step where it automatically creates and sets up Newspack’s recommended best-practices segments and prompts. For sites just getting started with Newspack Campaigns, this is a useful and time-saving feature! For sites that have been using Newspack Campaigns already but want to take more advantage of the Reader Activation System by enabling the full feature set, this step was often counterproductive, as it would deactivate their existing prompts and create new ones in their place. Today’s release allows you to skip the automatic creation of Campaigns prompts and segments while setting up the Reader Activation System, streamlining and making it easier to set up for publishers that are already using Newspack Campaigns.
Feature: Notify site admin on newsletter send failure
While rare, newsletters can sometimes fail to send from Newspack Newsletters due to API errors at the email service provider or other similar issues. In the event that a newsletter does fail to send from Newspack Newsletters, the site admin will now receive an email notifying them of the failure. This is a useful improvement because the actual sending of a newsletter is handled via a third-party provider like MailChimp or ActiveCampaign, so previously the only way to verify whether a newsletter sent was to log into MailChimp/ActiveCampaign and check in their interface.
Fix: Reliability improvements to Sign In With Google functionality
We have made a number of improvements around the way we store authentication info for the Sign In With Google feature of the Reader Activation System, including new database tables for storing authentication transients and better logging for tracking the success rate of people going through the flow. These changes will reduce occurrences of people going through the Sign In With Google flow yet failing to authenticate and sign in.
Hotfixes since April 22
We also released a number of bugfixes since our last release cycle:
- [Reader Activation] Sync purchase data only for most recent order or subscription (v3.8.3): Prior to this fix, contact data synced to the connected ESP could contain potentially conflicting info from different subscriptions, if a reader had more than one.
- [Newsletters] Made several incremental improvements and bugfixes related to the Mailchimp integration in Newspack Newsletters (v2.14.1, v2.14.2, v2.14.3)
