{"id":503,"date":"2017-12-27T12:20:52","date_gmt":"2017-12-27T18:20:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/easydigitaldownloads.com\/development\/?p=503"},"modified":"2021-12-15T15:30:56","modified_gmt":"2021-12-15T21:30:56","slug":"3-0-dev-plans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/easydigitaldownloads.com\/development\/2017\/12\/27\/3-0-dev-plans\/","title":{"rendered":"Development Plans for Easy Digital Downloads 3.0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Easy Digital Downloads 3.0 is expected to be released sometime in the first or second quarter of 2018 and with it we are shipping a significant number of changes. To help developers and users alike prepare for the 3.0 release, we’ll be communicating these changes through this blog consistently over the next few months.<\/p>\n

The 3.0 release will have two primary focuses:<\/p>\n

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  1. A complete migration of data from the WordPress default tables into custom database tables that offer significant performance and flexibility improvements.<\/li>\n
  2. A complete rebuild of the reporting tools offered in order to provide store owners accurate and actionable reports of their store’s eCommerce activity.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

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    We have chosen to skip the 2.9 version and jump straight to 3.0 as this is going to be a significant release with a huge number of underlying changes that pose the possibility of breaking backwards compatibility. Our goal is to always maintain 100% backwards compatibility but it is possible that we’ll need to strategically break backwards compatibility in some places for Easy Digital Downloads 3.0. As we work through the 3.0 release we’ll work to heavily document any and all break points that we are aware of.<\/p>\n

    Migration to custom database tables<\/h3>\n

    Since the very beginning Easy Digital Downloads, like the majority of other early plugins in WordPress, has relied on the standard WordPress posts and postmeta tables for the bulk of its data storage. At the time this was seen as the “right” way to build large plugins for WordPress. Time has proven, however, that this “standard” was poorly conceived and carried a number of significant disadvantages to a properly designed database schema. We have worked for the last few years to get past this early, short-sighted decision by implementing a proper database schema for Easy Digital Downloads and migrating all data carefully and safely from the old structure. This has, however, been a slow process. Moving massive amounts of mission critical data is a task that must be done with the utmost care.<\/p>\n

    Our original plan was to roll out a series of migrations over the course of a year or more. We have now chosen to finalize all of the migrations in a single release. Doing this will permit us to resolve long-standing issues with the reporting capabilities of EDD while simultaneously providing a huge performance improvement to stores, especially large stores.<\/p>\n

    The data that has already been migrated to EDD-specific database tables:<\/p>\n