Version 8.8.0 brings lots of cool updates to ShopWP like better syncing stability to expanded compatibility with subscription apps.
Let’s take a closer look at the most notable changes below!
Syncing improvements
The overall syncing functionality has become more stable for various edge-case scenarios. You will now see more useful error messages and increased support for PHP 8.0+.
For anyone using the ShopWP Webhooks extension, you’ll be happy to know the automatic syncing has been greatly improved as well. Prior to 8.8.0, there were various bugs which would prevent the Product webhooks from working as expected. Some products would not automatically sync over, others wouldn’t get properly deleted, etc.
Note: In order to fix these issues you must also update the ShopWP Webhooks extension to at least version 1.3.2.
Finally—for anyone struggling to update the Webhooks extension—this bug is also fixed. You no longer need to manually download a new version of the extension and upload it to WordPress.
Support for all subscription apps
I’m extremely excited about this one.
Many of you may remember the “Recharge” extension for ShopWP. I built this last year to support selling subscription products. And while it worked, it forced users to use Recharge for their subscriptions platform in Shopify. Users were pretty frustrated with this—especially after Recharge raised their prices recently.
Well, this limitation is no more!
As of version 8.8.0, ALL subscription apps are now compatible with ShopWP. This means you can use Recharge, Bold Subscriptions, Appstle, Loop, Seal, etc. They all just work.
This also means the ShopWP Recharge extension has been deprecated. Anyone who purchased this product in the past has had their subscription automatically cancelled and will not be charged again.
The subscriptions functionality is now built directly into the core ShopWP plugin. No need for additional WordPress plugin extensions to make it work. You now only need:
A Shopify subscriptions app
ShopWP
You can show the subscriptions widget by setting the subscriptions attribute to true:
Many of you have been asking for this so I’m really excited to finally have it ready for prime time.
Just like the Elementor extension, the Divi extension allows you to build your product layouts using custom Divi modules—all visually, without the need to mess around with shortcodes.
You can also create custom templates for the Product Detail and Product Listing pages.
The Divi extension lets you customize all 200+ ShopWP product settings using familiar Divi controls. While using the Divi page builder, changes will appear immediately without a page refresh.
Image zoom mobile improvements
The image zoom feature on mobile has been improved in 8.8.0. You can now either “tap” on the image or “long press” to start zooming. After releasing, the image will go back to normal, and the scroll functionality will come back as expected.
Prior to 8.8.0, there was a bug on mobile that would prevent the page scroll after zooming an image. This would require the user to refresh the page and mutter obscenities under their breath.
Much better now!
Lazy load images
You can now decide which images are lazy loaded with the new images_lazy_load attribute.
By default, all images are lazy loaded unless specified.
With the new images_lazy_load setting, you can force certain images to load immediately or wait until the user scrolls to them. This can help improve page speed scores by ensuring all images above the fold are loaded immediately.
Open reviews in modal
If you’re using the Yotpo reviews extension, you’ll be happy to know that reviews can now be opened in a modal for customers to easily view. This is an optional setting that you can turn off.
The modal can be opened by clicking on the “star rating” component that displays in the product layout.
By default, the star rating component will now show the modal on click.
Buy button improvements
This one is cool.
For years now, ShopWP has had the feature of showing “color swatches” automatically for any product with an option labeled, “Color”.
These color swatches will now show the user a “not available” state with a crossed-out line effect. This will change depending on what the user selects.
See a live example of this below:
Open checkout in pop out window
ShopWP can now open the Shopify checkout page in a convenient “pop out” window for your users. This works for both the normal cart checkout and direct checkout from a buy button.
To enable this, simply open the ShopWP plugin settings and find the “Checkout” section. From there will see the “Open checkout page in…” setting.
With this new feature, ShopWP can now open the Shopify checkout page in the following ways:
Current window
New tab / window
Pop out window
What’s next for ShopWP?
Now that 8.8.0 is out, I’ll be mostly working on the next major version of the plugin—9.0! I’m extremely excited for the improvements coming. I’m aiming to release 9.0 in the fall of 2024.
I recently sent out a poll asking which features y’all would like to see included in 9.0. If you haven’t filled out that poll, please do that! https://forms.gle/997k8FoREzZ3evPd7. It really helps me narrow down what to focus on.
Bug fixes will still be released during this time.
If anyone has any questions about 8.8.0 or the plugin in general, please submit a ticket or sent me a DM in the ShopWP Slack channel. Thanks y’all!
The Complete ShopWP 4.0 Roadmap: here’s what to expect
By: Andrew Robbins(Creator of ShopWP)
Updated on: November 9, 2023
If you haven’t heard yet, ShopWP 4.0 is coming later this summer! For months I’ve been gathering feedback asking how I can improve the plugin. During that time, I’ve amassed a ton of requests and I appreciate everyone who has reached out with feedback. You’re amazing!
In this post, I’ll be outlining the roadmap for version 4.0 and what everyone can expect as development continues.
It wouldn’t be a major release without new features! Version 4.0 is gearing up to bring many highly requested additions to the plugin–especially surrounding the Storefront, Cart, and Subscriptions. Below is a small sample of what’s to come:
Subscription products
Support for subscription products has been a recurring request for quite awhile. The difficulty has been primarily a lack of direct Shopify API support. However, this year Shopify released many new API endpoints that make displaying and managing subscriptions possible!
Even with these new changes, actually providing support for subscriptions is no easy task. Shopify decided to only provide API access, and instead, lean heavily on their partners to create the admin settings, UI, etc. In other words, subscriptions are still not really “native” to the Shopify platform. Because of this it takes a massive amount of work from start to finish to provide a workable solution.
With this in mind, instead of completely reinventing the “subscriptions wheel”, I’m planning to integrate with one of the most popular Shopify subscriptions apps, Recharge.
I think this makes the most sense, at least in the short term. I know some of you probably use Bold Subscriptions and I would like to integrate with this app as well. However I’m going to start with Recharge first, and if all goes well, integrate with Bold after the 4.0 release.
Storefront improvements
One of the biggest pain points currently surrounding the Storefront component is getting things setup. As it stands, there are three “steps” that you must take: adding the proper HTML, creating the shortcode itself (and applying the dropzone attributes), and finally adding the CSS.
All of this is way too complicated and should be abstracted away. To solve this, I’ll be providing users a way to visually build the Storefront component. This will create a much easier way to customize things and will display a preconfigured shortcode for copy & paste. I think this will not only introduce more users to this useful component, but massively simplify things.
Another common request has been to provide more options for filtering by various criteria, like collections. I’ve been meaning to add this for awhile and am happy to announce that it will finally be shipped in 4.0.
Cart improvements
The ShopWP Cart experience is a central aspect of the plugin. Much of the user’s attention is eventually funneled into this component.
One powerful feature of the current cart experience is the ability to add custom data to an order. I have many people asking me how to implement the data, but it always requires development experience to configure. It’s not very intuitive as it currently stands, that’s for sure.
In 4.0 I’ll be adding an easy way for store owners to provide customers simple cart fields such as datepickers, text fields, email fields, etc. All of these will be configurable and easily added to the cart.
I also have plans to add shipping information to the cart so the user can configure this before checking out.
Divi extension
Last year I released both an Elementor and Beaver Builder extension for ShopWP. This allows anyone using those page builders to easily drag and drop their products into complex custom layouts. So far the reception has been great! But people keep asking me … where’s Divi?!
An official Divi extension for ShopWP will finally be coming in version 4.0. Wahoo!
Successful user experiences generally excel at making complex interactions dead simple. This is one of my guiding principles to apply in 4.0.
An example of this was recently added in version 3.6.1 with the “Edit in Shopify” button on the product screen. This does two important things at once; it allows the user to easily edit their product information (without context switching), and it also clearly communicates how the plugin works (one-way data syncing).
“Edit in Shopify” button on product edit screen in current versionInline “Edit in Shopify” link in current version
Keeping with this spirit, below is a non-exhaustive list of UX improvements that are planned for ShopWP 4.0:
Improved syncing
The syncing process could benefit from a few major upgrades 🙂.
First, it would be great if there was more control over what is synced. In the current version of the plugin, using the “Sync Detail Pages” button will create the product posts. However behind the scenes, it will also sync your product tags, variants, images, etc into dedicated database tables. This is largely a waste, since most users won’t need this data nor do they know that it exists. Coming in version 4.0 will be dedicated syncing tools. This will allow you to sync specific data only, such as tags to use with the Storefront component or product images.
Second, there will be an upgrade surrounding automatic syncing. The current plugin uses webhooks when responding to events that happen inside Shopify (such as a new product being created). Version 4.0 will come with a cron job option, allowing you to schedule dedicated syncing at predictable intervals.
Finally, much of the syncing will be refactored in React and the current jQuery implementation will be removed.
Simplifying overall plugin
The plugin needs to be simplified! I hear this feedback a lot and I agree for the most part. There are tons of opportunities to streamline and hide details which most users don’t need to know about.
For example, the process of displaying products is still too complicated. Unless you’re using one of the many Gutenberg blocks or extensions that come with ShopWP Pro, you’re probably spending a lot of time fiddling with shortcodes. Apart from it being tedious, it leaves too much room for user error if you mistype a shortcode attribute or miss a single character.
With this in mind, version 4.0 will come with a brand new visual builder tool! This will enable users to visually build their product layout in a much more intuitive way.
Better permalinks customization
At the moment, the plugin’s permalink structure is pretty limited. As it stands you’re restricted to the slug of whatever your default pages are set to. This can result in problems if you want your default page to contain a separate slug, or if you want to do something fancy.
Version 4.0 will provide a similar permalink customization experience to that of WooCommerce which will allow you to set the exact permalink you want.
In addition, I’ll be creating various PHP hooks which will allow developers to make custom rewrite rules and such.
New translations
This one is pretty straight forward. Many new translations will be coming to ShopWP Pro including Norwegian and Canadian French.
While the current ShopWP docs site does a decent job of documenting the plugin options, many of the guides and screenshots are outdated. This needs to be updated to reflect all the awesome new (and current) features that the plugin provides.
I think it would also be useful to refine the getting started section for new users. The current “syncing” video shows a completely different plugin UI, the screenshots don’t match, and the actual copy is fairly outdated.
I’ll also be creating short tutorial videos (1-2 minutes long) demonstrating how to use the various plugin features. I think this should help lessen the confusion over what they do and how to use them. For example, “What the heck is the “connective” shortcode attribute?” and “How do I display a simple product carousel?”.
Ahhh, the perennial bug fixes. We all hate bugs, and I’m making it my mission to squash as many as I can for version 4.0. Below are some of the most annoying bugs that will be resolved:
Fixing “https” error during sync
This is an issue that was recently created in version 3.5.1 due to edits made to the syncing. If you see this error showing it’s because you accidently left the “https://” part in your myshopify.com domain. This can also throw an error if you keep the www part as well.
Obviously this needs to be fixed. The user should be able to add the myshopify.com domain with or without https and www.
If you’re experiencing this issue, just reinstall the plugin and connect to Shopify without https:// or www in your myshopify.com domain. In 4.0 these will be removed automatically for you.
Sale notice mistakenly showing for all products
I recently added a “sale” notice on top of the product’s feature image, similar to the “out of stock” notice. Unfortunately it appears that this is being mistakenly added to all products, not just products that are on sale.
To temporarily fix this, add this CSS to your WordPress theme:
The Pro version of the plugin provides an option to sync a products feature image as a native WordPress image. Recently this has stopped working and will be fixed in version 4.0.
Divi builder conflict
One of the more annoying bugs has been the conflict with Divi. Apparently the JavaScript of ShopWP and Divi conflict with one another, preventing Divi from working at all when ShopWP is installed.
In addition to fixing this compatibility issue, I’ll be creating a dedicated Divi extension similar to Elementor and Beaver Builder.
Regression test webhooks
The current automatic post syncing has some compatibility issues when collections are updated. This is due to some bugs in the current webhooks code. A big thanks to wowflak and Otmar Manuela in Slack for pointing this out to me. This one will finally be resolved in 4.0.
Since version 1.0, I’ve always tried my best to prioritize developer features for the plugin. As a developer myself, I always appreciate it when plugin authors open extensibility up to the broader community. More importantly I think this can lead to a better overall product for everyone.
More hooks! PHP and JavaScript
It goes without saying that hooks are the primary entry point for devs. I’ll be providing a ton of new PHP and JavaScript hooks for things like:
Storefront
Cart
Pricing
Roles & Capabilities
…and more
More PHP functions
In addition to the hooks, I’ll be adding many new internal PHP functions for doing things like grabbing tags, vendors, or fetching products from a collection. Many of these “internal” PHP functions are hidden, so I’ll be doing a better job at showcasing them and demonstrating how they work.
Performance 🏎
Ecommerce needs to be fast. I’m really striving to make the plugin as lean as possible in 4.0. No more loading things that aren’t necessary! This means I’ll be lazy loading much more of the JavaScript and stripping out code that just isn’t used anymore.
Also, many of you have made it clear that you want your Google PageSpeed numbers to go up. Rest assured. I’ll be making sure the plugin passes these crucial tests with flying colors.
Track Progress 🎯
I’m trying a new process of being as transparent as possible in this release. I’m hoping this provides better communication during development and makes you feel apart of the process.
I’ve setup a public Trello board for the ShopWP 4.0 tasks. I’ll be updating this everyday as I continue working through the release. You can view this board if you’re curious to know what exactly will be in 4.0 and how much longer the release will take.
That’s it for now! I hope this post succeeded in providing a detailed rundown of all the exciting things coming in the next evolution of ShopWP! If you have any feedback whatsoever, please don’t hesitate to send me an email: hello@wpshop.io.
Thanks y’all!
ShopWP 2.0 is here!
By: Andrew Robbins(Creator of ShopWP)
Updated on: November 9, 2023
For the last eight months, we’ve been arduously developing the next version of ShopWP. After what seems like an eternity, we’re happy to finally announce its completion; 2.0 is here and ready to use! 👏👏👏
When we made version 1.0, certain design decisions were made which added unforeseen limitations to the overall capabilities of the plugin. Let’s walk through them quickly.
Syncing compatibility
The first limitation is how 1.0 syncs the Shopify data. Take products for example. Because version 1.0 renders everything on the server, we must sync everything into WordPress so that we can access it from the PHP templates. And when I say everything I mean just that; product titles, images, prices, variant information, collections etc. Everything is synced and stored in custom database tables in version 1.0.
This isn’t necessarily bad, assuming your web host can handle it. But this brings us to the first major limitation of version 1.0 which is that:
Making a custom syncing process compatible across most web environments turns out to be very hard! 😆
In order for the plugin to be successful, we need to make it available to as many users as possible including those who may have less than adequate hosting providers. In this regard, the plugin has always been hamstrung—requiring lay users to adjust things they shouldn’t need to adjust simply to use the plugin like PHP and Apache settings, for example.
Data reliability
Another limitation of version 1.0 is data reliability. If you’re able to successfully sync your Shopify store, you’re still responsible for ensuring this data stays up to date. For example, if you’re a Free user, you need to manually resync your store each time you make any changes inside Shopify. If you’re a Pro user, you have access to automatic resyncing but this can also sometimes fail due to web server issues. These can be annoying to deal with.
Now for some users, this isn’t a big deal. They can simply do a resync when they need. However the issue is this: for the users which it is a problem, it’s a majorbig deal problem. In fact, it’s a deal breaker. They simply cannot use the plugin without the accompanying data reliability due to their store requirements.
How 2.0 solves the current limitations
Version 2.0 solves the above limitations by providing a new feature called Lite sync. Lite sync is an alternative syncing method that when turned on, won’t actually “sync” any Shopify data into the WordPress database at all. Instead, it fetches the data at runtime via JavaScript.
This solves both limitations. The plugin no longer has to perform a resource intensive process, and the data is always up to date since it’s fetched on each page load.
In case you’re wondering, we do still provide the option to sync your store the old way. To do this, you need to manually disable Lite sync and turn on a new setting called Sync posts. Doing this will sync your data as native WordPress posts, create the single pages like normal, and store all the data inside WordPress.
Migrating from v1 to v2
Migrating your site from v1 to v2 does require some consideration. We unfortunately had to make some breaking changes so it’s important to exercise caution before updating.
We’ve made a detailed migration guide that you’ll want to check out. Also, be sure to only update the plugin on a staging environment first to avoid any breaking changes leaking into your live site!
Benefits of using 2.0
There are many benefits of using ShopWP 2.0. The biggest ones are:
Less syncing issues In 2.0, syncing is no longer a painful process and will not prevent you from using the plugin. Lite sync is turned on by default.
Always in sync This is probably the most important update in 2.0. Many store owners simply need this as an absolute requirement if they plan to sell anything at all.
New features We’ve packed 2.0 with a ton of new features, including product image zooming, infinite scrolling, product searching, cart notes, custom checkout attributes, and a whole new way of sorting / filtering your products called Storefront.
Faster, Faster, Faster! We’ve refactored the way the overall UI operates and have improved things greatly. For example, this means no longer waiting for products to be added to the cart, or waiting for dropdown selections to “happen”. All of these interactions now occur immediately which will make your users much happier.
Moving forward
There are many lessons we’ve learned over the last couple years of working on ShopWP. One of these is that we must provide more frequent updates. So starting in 2.0, we’ll now be pushing out weekly plugin updates that will contain smaller but less risky changes.
There are many lessons we’ve learned over the last couple years of working on ShopWP. One of these is that we must provide more frequent updates. So starting in 2.0, we’ll now be pushing out weekly plugin updates that will contain smaller but less risky changes.
Another lesson we’ve learned is that it’s important to cultivate the feedback of all of you. A few months ago we conducted our first poll of what features people would like to see in 2.0. This went fantastically, and we’ll be doing more of these.
We also want to make a point to provide better incorporation of native Shopify features into the plugin. For example things like providing customers as native WordPress users, analytics integrations, etc. Keep an eye out for more of these features later this year!
