Version 1.5 Released

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