Save as Draft and other improvements for Frontend Submissions 2.5

Frontend Submissions is one of our most widely used extensions and is the foundation for many digital marketplaces around the web. Today we’re happy to announce the release of a new version of Frontend Submissions that brings some significant improvements to the plugin, including a new option for vendors to save draft submissions, improved frontend markup throughout the plugin, new template files, and more. Version 2.5 was released as a beta two weeks ago and after extensive testing, we’re confident it is ready for everyone.

Save as draft option

In version 2.5, we have introduced a new option that allows vendors to save their submissions as a draft. This allows vendors to save their progress and continue it later so they do not need to complete their entire submission in a single session.

The Save Draft option will be shown to vendors when they are submitting new products and when editing existing products that are not yet published.

Vendor stats recount tool

There are times when site admins need to regenerate the earnings and sales statistics for vendors, perhaps when accounts are combined or products have been added or removed from a vendor’s account. In version 2.5 we have introduced a new tool that allows site admins to regenerate the stats shown on a vendor’s account.

This tool can be found in Downloads → Tools.

New toggle field type

With this new version of Frontend Submissions, we have introduced a new field type that allows site admins to add a “Toggle” field to the submission, registration, and profile forms.

Toggle fields are great for Yes/No type questions that require a vendor to opt in or out of a particular condition. Toggle fields can also be used to turn features and options on or off. For example, this toggle field could be used to enable or disable options provided by other Easy Digital Downloads plugins simply by providing the appropriate meta key.

Email alert for scheduled product publication

A new email option has been added that allows vendors to automatically receive an email when one of their products changes from scheduled to published. This will allow vendors to be notified when one of their products that has been scheduled for release is actually published on the site.

Improved frontend dashboard, form, and field markup

One of the biggest challenges theme authors have had with integrating Frontend Submissions into their themes has been the fact that the markup introduced in version 1.0 of the plugin was ultimately not well suited for its use cases. In version 2.5 we have worked to improve as much of the markup as possible to make it easier for developers to integrate it into their sites and to bring the markup up to expected standards.

There are several areas we have adjusted:

• Tables have been removed from the login and registration forms and replaced with div tags.
• Fields in the submission, profile, registration, and contact forms incorrectly had fieldset tags wrapped around each field. These have been replaced with more semantically correct div tags.
• A div wrapper has been added to the Vendor Dashboard that surrounds the menu and the main dashboard body.
• Inline CSS has been removed from all frontend forms.
• H1 tags have been replaced with legend tags where appropriate and H3 tags everywhere else.
• Some input fields did not have proper labels with for attributes. These have been fixed.
• A lot of CSS class names and IDs have been standardized. Note, no existing class names or IDs were removed or changed for backwards compatibility reasons.

These changes should make it significantly easier for theme developers and site owners to customize the display of all elements in Frontend Submissions.

More template files

We have introduced several new template files that will make it easier for theme authors and site owners to customize the display of the Vendor Dashboard area. The new files are:

• frontend-edit-product.php
• frontned-new-product.php
• frontend-profile.php

These template files are pretty minimal as the bulk of the form display has to be handled through the form builder, but the files are now available so content around the forms can be more easily added or customized.

Other improvements

Along with the highlights above, we’ve also introduced a number of other improvements and bug fixes:

• A bug that caused files to be reassigned to site admins when editing a product in the backend has been fixed.
• The email sent to vendors when a vendor is manually approved was not being sent.
• Several hooks have been updated with additional parameters.
• The opt-in data tracking has been removed.
• A bug that caused the files section to not display on the vendor dashboard has been fixed.
• Vendor avatars now support all of the standard sizes.
• Several pagination bugs have been fixed.
• Pasting a file URL into the file upload field instead of uploading a field failed silently, now it shows an error message.
• Orders showed an incorrect status on the vendor dashboard when they were any status other than complete.
• File uploads are now always attached to the product they were uploaded to.
• New hooks have been added to the Orders tab of the vendor dashboard.
• The Earnings tab of the vendor dashboard now displays an overview of the vendor’s earnings.
• Usage of the deprecated get_page() function has been replaced with get_post()
• Quick edit now works on the Downloads list table
• The settings that allowed the form used for submission, profile, contact, and registration have been removed as they were problematic and not needed.

Version 2.5 is available for one-click update from the Plugins page of all sites that have a valid license key activated. It can also be downloaded from your account page. If you do not yet have a license, see the product page for purchasing information.