It has been a long time in development but today I’m thrilled to announce that Easy Digital Downloads version 1.5 is out and ready for use. 1.5 is by far the largest update we have ever done and it has a huge number of phenomenal new features, as well as a large number of bug fixes and general improvements.
The most substantial change that users will notice is the dramatically improved checkout page. We spent a long time discussion the user experience of the checkout page and the changes in v1.5 are what came from the discussion.
Here are screenshots of the checkout page before and after:
Many of the changes we made were inspired from very prominent and successful UX studies done throughout the e-commerce industry.
Some of the highlights of the new checkout UX are:
Description text for each field to ensure customers understand what the field is for
Better placement of fields and field label
Improved default styling
Option to define a default payment method that is loaded immediately
Payment method select simplified by being changed to radio buttons
But the checkout UX isn’t the only thing we have done in v1.5.
New RESTful API
While targeted directly at developers, the new API that we have built into Easy Digital Downloads makes it possible to build fantastic 3rd party applications for retrieving store stats and info for earnings, sales, products, and customers. This API will make it possible to build mobile applications for quickly checking your store’s stats, to build desktop widgets for displaying your latest sales, and many more really powerful integrations.
The API is fully documented and ready to be used.
New Fees Class
The new EDD_Fees class, also targeted for developers, allows for arbitrary fees to be added to the shopping cart. Fees can be positive or negative (a discount) amounts and make it exceptionally easy for adding things like handling fees, member discounts, global store discounts, and anything else.
The EDD_Fees class is what makes the Simple Shipping extension possible, in case you need a real world use case.
Improved Discount Codes
The discount code system in EDD is something we have wanted to upgrade for a long time, and today it is here. Discount codes can now be limited to specific products, one or many, allowing you better control over store promotions. With this upgrade you can now require that specific products be purchased in order for a discount to be valid.
Along with product-specific discounts, you can also now set on a per-discount basis whether discounts can be used once-per-customer or an unlimited number of times.
Improved Export and Reporting
We have added some minor, yet important, updates to the Reports and Export page that will be exceptionally useful:
Estimated monthly earnings and sales storewide
Export payments by status
Export all customers of specific products
Complete Changelog
New: Added EDD_API class to provide a fully RESTful API to retrieve sales and earnings stats
New: Dramatically improved layout, design, and UX for the checkout page
New: Changed payment method select to radio buttons
New: Added option to define a default payment method
New: Added option to export all payments of a specific status
New: Added an option to export all buyers of specific products
New: Added per-product discount codes
New: Added option to enable/disable one-use-per cusomter discount codes
New: Added estimated monthly earnings / sales to Reports
New: Added product microdata for Schema.org
New: Added ability to edit a payment’s user ID
New: Added option to send a test purchase receipt
New: Added new template files for the shopping cart and shopping cart widget
New: Added improved file download delivery to better support large files
New: Added improved session management with WP_Session and removed reliance on PHP $_SESSION
New: Added arbitrary cart fees class
New: Added option to edit purchased price options in the edit payment screen
New: Added option to view purchase receipts in the browser
New: Dramatically improved tax options
Fixed: A critical bug that made it possible to find download files via Google
Fixed: Prices lose decimal points when saving if thousands / decimal separators are left blank
Fixed: Payment History layout bug when viewing from small (mobile) screens
Fixed: Updating payment record removes buyer’s email address
Fixed: Non-object notice during uninstall
Fixed: Problem with downloading files after purchasing multipe price options for the same product
Fixed: Issue with India and zip code validation
Fixed: PayPal purchases marked as complete more than once
Fixed: csv_cols_out() didn’t correctly apply_filters()
Fixed: Bug with SSL and ajax
Fixed: Report times were out of sync
Fixed: No Permission to Download error when purchasing products with multiple files
Fixed: Gateway redirect sometimes fails with ajax
Fixed: Multiple price options mode doesn’t save
Fixed: Missing parameter in edd_log_user_in()
Fixed: Undefined index error on checkout
Fixed: shop_vendor role can’t assign categories
Fixed: Products can’t be removed from edit payment screen
Fixed: Sorry, Trouble retrieving payment receipt error
Fixed: Issue with Show Price with Taxes bug
