Over the past 4 weeks we have been working on a break up of our ‘family’ of WooCommerce Quotes and Orders / Email Inquiry & Cart Options plugins. The ‘family’ of plugins has grown since the first release almost 6 years ago. This is a timeline of the growth of the family, each new release included all of the features of the previous version with more features.
WooCommerce Email Inquiry & Cart Options Pro
= 1.0.0 – 2012/06/09 = First production release
WooCommerce Email Inquiry & Cart Options Free Lite version
= 1.0.0 – 2013/03/07 = First working release
WooComerce Email Inquiry Ultimate
= 1.0.0 – 2013/05/12 = First production release
WooCommerce Quotes and Orders
= 1.0.0 – 2013/06/15 = First production release
WooCommerce Quotes and Orders – Stand Alone Plugin.
Stage 1 of the break up of the ‘family’ was removing the WooCommerce Quotes and Orders plugin from the family. This involved performing major surgery on it and relaunching it as a Stand Alone version 3.0.0. This involved a 4 step process.
Step 1. Rewrite WooCommerce Quotes and Orders as a Stand alone plugin.
WooCommerce Quotes and Orders even though it contained all of the Single Product Page Rules, Email Inquiry and Read More features has always really been a different product. In addition we have found that the Page Rules from the Email Inquiry family really restricted further Quotes and Orders development. We finally made the decision to rebuild it as a stand alone plugin. Quotes and orders was completely refactored, in doing this we removed the Product Page rules, Hide Cart and Hide price, Email Inquiry and Read more features, created new namespace, class and function names, cleaned up the code and made various coding enhancements.
Step 2. WooCommerce Email Inquiry No Conflict
Having Split the Email Inquiry Ultimate features out of Quotes and Orders we then updated both plugins so that there where no conflicts with Rules and Roles when both plugins where installed on a site. This involved adding hooks to the Email Inquiry Ultimate plugin and filters to the Quotes and Orders plugin to over ride any conflicting Product Page Rules that is set in the Email Inquiry plugin.
Step 3. Taking care of our active Subscribers.
The next step involved creating a Special WooCommerce Email Inquiry Ultimate Subscription for each active WooCommerce Quotes and Orders Lifetime and Annual subscription holder. The Special Subscription with corresponding site activations was created and added to active subscribers accounts. These special subscriptions show on a new tab on the a3rev Customers My Account Console. The special subscription also showa on the a3 Dashboard > Mange menu when the site is connected to the customers account.
Step 4. WooCommerce Quotes and Orders v 3.0.0 release.
The release of the new stand alone WooCommerce Quotes and Orders version 3.0.0 plugin was announced via email to all active subscription holders as well as a dismissable notice that shows on the sites dashboard after updating advising if the Page Rules, Email Inquiry or Read more features where in use on the site then the WooCommerce Email Inquiry Ultimate plugin was available and should be installed. We have created a function in version 3.0.0 that saved any of that data so that all that was required was to install and activate WooCommerce Email Inquiry Ultimate.
WooCommerce Quotes and Orders version 3.0.0 was released on the 7th of July ( 11 days ago ). To date there have been no reports of issues with the upgrade which is very pleasing. Customers have been able to run the update and where required install the newly created WooCommerce Email Inquiry Ultimate Special Special Subscription plugin from the a3 Dashboard > Plugins menu.
Read Stage II of this project