We’ve silently released a few minor upgrades to WunderAutomation all through the fall without talking much about them. Today it’s time for 1.5.9 and this post covers updates all since version 1.5.6 was released back in July.
1.6 on the horizon
Our efforts are currently split up between a bunch of new features we have planned for version 1.6 and building out our eco system of add-ons. Among the features we have in the pipeline for 1.6 are:
- User interface improvements. After more than 20 releases in the past 12 months some of our initial ideas about the user interface needs some love.
- Chaining workflows together – allowing one workflow to conditionally start another workflow.
- Improved logging – we want to make it easier to dig into the details and see exactly what happens when a workflow is triggered
- Run workflows manually and in bulk. This will a
Version 1.6 will also mark the beginning of a more strict approach to semantic versioning. We’ve been sneaking in new features in patch releases in a way we have promised not to.
What’s new in WunderAutomation
Ok, so going all the way back to version 1.5.6, here’s a summary of all changes:
- Feature: All built in email actions can send outbound emails to all users with a specific WordPress role.
- Feature: All built in email actions now have an optional From field. Before this was added all your outbound emails were sent from the default WordPress administrative user.
- Feature: It’s possible to use WooCommerce order summaries as parameters in all actions. This means that you can supply full order details and customer information about an order when sending a customized WooCommerce order notification.
- User interface: Actions can be reordered
- User interface: Easier to access new user, posts, orders etc in subsequent actions via the parameter editor.
- Bug fix: When you’ve created a workflow using a filter that doesn’t exist any longer, the workflow wouldn’t render
- Bug fix: If you never visited the settings screen and saved your settings, the logger class would emit a PHP warning to the log.
Upgrade PHP in time
As PHP 8 is about to be released and WordPress promises PHP 8 support in version 5.6 we think it’s about time to abandon our support for PHP 5.6. WooCommerce bumped up their PHP requirement to 7.0 at the beginning of 2020 and so will we. In the short term this just means that we stop testing our products on PHP 5.6 and start testing them for PHP 8 instead.
But be warned, you should follow the official WordPress recommendation and make sure you are running on PHP 7.3 or higher.