Product Update: AutomateWoo 4.6

We are delighted to announce AutomateWoo 4.6 – our first major release since Automattic acquired Prospress.

While we’ve been settling in at our new home we’ve continued to build on AutomateWoo and have put together a bunch of great new features, performance improvements and bug fixes – we hope you like them!

Coupon handling improvements

In time for the holiday sale season we’ve made a number of improvements to how we handle coupons in the admin area.

Coupon rules now benefit from a new AJAX powered search field. Instead of trying to load all your coupons at once, you can dynamically search for the desired coupon/s.

Similarly the customer.generate_coupon variable builder now uses a new searchable coupon field – no more having to copy and paste or remember coupon codes!

In addition to these changes providing a better user experience they provide scalability and performance benefits for stores that have a large number of coupons.

Localized price formatting

WooCommerce allows store managers to customize their store’s currency settings depending on their locale. Settings that can be adjusted include the currency position, the thousand separator, decimal separator and even the number of decimals.

An important change in this release is improved support for localized prices. AutomateWoo will now always display prices in the format specified in your store’s currency settings.

We recommend double checking your workflows after this update to ensure that there are no unexpected changes or side effects, especially if you happen to be expecting non-localized prices even though you have customized your currency settings.

New action: Add Subscription Note

In this release we’ve included a little something for our WooCommerce Subscriptions fans – you can now add subscription notes via workflows using the new “Subscription – Add Note” action.

It works the same way as the existing the “Order – Add Note” action but only applies to Subscriptions.

New Regex comparison option

In our quest to give you more powerful marketing automations we’ve added a new regular expression (regex) comparison option for all string rules and meta rules.

Rules that benefit from this new option include (but are not limited to) the Customer – Phone, Customer – Postcode and Order – Custom Field rules.

A simple example is if you wanted to target multiple postcodes in a single rule you could achieve it using the new “matches regex” option with something like:

Previously you would need to create a rule for each postcode.

Improvements to logging

When debugging it’s important to know what’s happening under the hood. We’ve added background trigger activity logs to your logs tab.

These logs show when a background process is started, continued and finished. We also include the batch offset.

Performance improvements

This release also includes a bunch of changes behind the scenes to improve the overall performance of AutomateWoo. The biggest improvement is the addition of object caching for all AutomateWoo custom table meta values.

We’ve also optimised a number of database queries used when retrieving values such as customer order count and total spend and we’ve added additional caching for those values as well.

Improvements to customer total spend and order count

In this release, we’ve improved how AutomateWoo calculates the customer total spend and order count for registered users. Previously, AutomateWoo would only look for orders that matched the customer’s user ID. This meant that when a customer placed an order without logging in, the order would not be included in these calculations.

AutomateWoo now includes all orders that match the customer’s billing email or the customer’s user ID. This change will take effect as soon as you update and will apply to all previous orders.

This change affects the following AutomateWoo components:

Customer – Order Count rule
Customer – Total Spent rule
Customer Order Count Reaches trigger
Customer Total Spend Reaches trigger
customer.order_count variable
customer.total_spent variable

Additional changes in AutomateWoo 4.6

New – Added variables: customer.username and order.subtotal
New – Added support for variables in price fields.
Tweak – Moved to using a single customer meta data table. Previously customer meta data was split between 2 tables, either in the WP user meta table when the customer was registered or in the AW guest meta table when the customer was a guest.
Tweak – Because product reviews can not be added to product variations we have modified our product review templates to convert product variations to parent products.
Fixed – The order.date_shipped variable now displays a human readable date instead of a timestamp. The format can also be adjusted, defaulting to the standard WooCommerce date format.
Fixed – Improved reliability of AutomateWoo CRON scheduling and handling of daylight saving timezone changes.
Fixed – Until now workflows could run while missing required data. We’ve fixed this by adding in some checks to make sure orders/subscriptions/memberships/workflows are not trashed and that workflows are not missing data
Fixed – Added a fix to ensure that a registered users prior orders when placed as guest are now considered by the Order – Is Customer’s First rule
Fixed – We no longer set session tracking cookies on admin requests including ajax and plugin update requests.

Ready to update?

As this is a large plugin update, we recommend you test and/or monitor any workflows that are critical to your store after updating. If you think you’ve found a bug, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

If you are running any custom code for AutomateWoo we highly recommend testing that your code still behaves as expected after updating. Did you know you can install AutomateWoo on a test site without it counting to your activation limit?

Features suggestions and voting

Have an idea on how to improve AutomateWoo? Check out our ideas board! You can request and vote on the features you want added to AutomateWoo or its add-ons. Votes heavily influence what features we work on. Some ideas we are currently working on include:

The ideas board is also a great way to discuss how a feature should actually work and you can even get notified when a feature you need is completed!

We’re here to help!

Having trouble figuring something out? Got a bug to report? Get in touch with our team!

Thank you for using AutomateWoo!