Easy Digital Downloads version 2.5 has been released! This update is a culmination of six months of development and the work of 14 different developers. We’re thrilled to bring this release to you today; let’s take a quick look at what is new.
There are several notable improvements to Easy Digital Downloads 2.5, both for store owners and extension and site developers.
Product Export
In 2.5 we have introduced a new export tool that allows you to download a CSV file of all download products in your shop. It is located at Downloads > Reports > Export and looks like this:
This new export tool will allow store owners to more easily migrate product data between sites and better support those store owners who maintain external product catalogues and reports.
The CSV export of products is the first step in Easy Digital Downloads providing easy, reliable export/import for sites. In an upcoming version, we will also be introducing a product / payment import tool that significantly improves upon the currently available import options.
Settings Sections
Out of the box, Easy Digital Downloads has quite a lot of settings. When one, two, or even twenty extensions are activated on a site, the settings pages can become very unwieldy and difficult to navigate.
In Easy Digital Downloads 2.5, we have introduced tab sections on the settings screens that organizes each tab into logical sections.
The new sections make navigating the store settings dramatically easier. This improvement can also be utilized by extensions to help better organize the Extensions tab and settings registered by extensions. To assist extension authors in updating their settings, we’ve published a guide on our development blog on how to make use of the new sections.
Recount Tools
With e-Commerce, stats are important. Occasionally, due to a huge number of reasons, stats can get out of sync. To help keep your stats up to date when this happens, we have introduced a new tool that allows you to recount product and store stats.
Located in Downloads > Tools, this recount tool can be used to recalculate the following:
Recount total store earnings and sales
Recount earnings and sales for a particular product
Recount earnings and sales for all products in the store
Recount lifetime value and purchase counts for all customers
Reset store by deleting all payment and customer records
We have also added a recount option to the customer details screen for individual customers. This allows store owners to recount the stats and reconnect payment records to a customer if ever needed.
While these recount options should not be needed often (sometimes not ever), they are exceptionally useful should the need arise.
EDD_Payment
Payment data has been a bit cumbersome to work with for developers since version 1.0. In 2.5, we have introduced a new developer tool called EDD_Payment that makes it dramatically easier for developers to interact with, create, and update payment records in Easy Digital Downloads.
As a quick example, this is how simple creating a new payment record is now:
$payment = new EDD_Payment(); // Instantiates a payment object
$payment->add_download( 12 ); // Adds download id 12 to the payment at it's default price
$payment->email = 'lisa@example.org'; // Email is required for a payment
$payment->status = 'complete'; // Completes the payment
$payment->save(); // Writes to the database any changes that were made
If you are not a developer, you won’t notice any difference at all, but for developers and extension authors, this is a really important change. Developers can learn more about this class on our documentation page.
Download File Ordering
As Easy Digital Downloads is all about the delivery of digital files to customers, having control over how those files are organized is important. In 2.5, we have further improved the File Downloads interface of the product edit screen by introducing drag-and-drop ordering of the files. You can now re-order the files at anytime so that they are displayed to your customers in the exact order that you want. This is especially significant for stores that sell sequenced files (such as education courses) that are designed to be consumed in a specific order.
Other notable improvements
File download logs are now available in the REST API at /edd-api/file-download-logs/
Payments can now be searched by discount code
REST API is now faster due to moving its processing to the “wp” hook
Product quantities now included in payment history export
Credit card fields now include HTML5 required attributes
Free products can now be excluded from sales and earnings graphs
Inline CSS styling removed from the [downloads] shortcode
Notable bugs fixed
Payment stats updated on customer when non-complete payments are deleted
PayPal IPN using deprecated mc_gross
Verification link missing from email when using plain-text template
Install process does not run properly when network activating
Invalid HTML markup when viewing in-browser receipt
Payment methods not hidden when 100% discount code applied
Ajax call to load dashboard store stats fires on every page
Symlink file downloads option does not work
File download links break when qTranslate/WPML plugins are activated
Payment search by download ID not working properly
We are thrilled for this release and hope you enjoy it as well. As with all major updates, we strongly recommend that you use a staging or test server to test the updates on your site before installing it on a live site.