ShopMagic 2.1 is here. We released it last week with a desire to make a more reliable and robust scheduling system. What’s more we’ve added support for custom WooCommerce order statuses and some more tweaks under the hood.
Action Scheduler as a reliable and scalable scheduling system
The biggest change in ShopMagic 2.1 is the introduction of Action Scheduler. According to AS website:
It just so happens, this functionality also creates a robust job queue for background processing large queues of tasks in WordPress. With the additional of logging and an administration interface, that also provide tracability on your tasks processed in the background.
Before 2.1, the Delayed Actions add-on was using WP-Cron and on numerous occasions it proved to create more bad than good.
Right now we use Actions Scheduler, which is built into WooCommerce core to help us queue all actions generated by your ShopMagic events.
Skipping the queue
When the actions get queued by Action Scheduler it creates a small delay, in most cases less than a minute.
Although this delay is small, in certain events this can still cause some user concerns. For example user registration or some other transactional events.
That’s why we’ve also prepared a filter that you can use to skip the queue and process the actions immediately when the event happens.
You will find examples how to disable the queue in our docs →
Rechecking order status before run
It also gave us the ability to recheck the order status before the action is run.
For example, you create an event to send an email 3 days after the order is completed. When the order status changes to completed, the action is scheduled. BUT, the next day the customer asks for a refund, which you decide to grant.
If the status wasn’t checked when the actions was run, the email will get sent to a refunded order, which could be a bad thing. Fore example you don’t want this customer to get a review request email when he already returned the product, right?
So now, you have the ability to enable rechecking order status before run:
Custom order statuses
Support for custom order statuses was one of the most requested features for ShopMagic. I can understand why. It creates a whole lot of new options to automate not only the marketing processes in WooCommerce, but for instance also the fulfillment process.
Say hello to custom order statuses support in ShopMagic:
WooCommerce Slack Integration by ShopMagic
The tweaks under the hood connected to our fields library, gave us also the opportunity to create a brand new add-on for ShopMagic. From now on, when you upgrade to ShopMagic PRO, you will get access to our brand new ShopMagic Slack add-on.
With ShopMagic Slack you and your team can to stay up to date with what’s happening in your store right in Slack. All events supported in ShopMagic can now get posted to Slack, examples:
- Get a notification when the order payment fails – instant notification is crucial if you want to immediately contact the customer and offer help with his payment.
- Get a notification when the order is ready to be packed or shipped (with the support of our new status changed event).
- Get a notification after the order is refunded.
What’s coming next?
We are now hard at work with ShopMagic 2.2. In this version we want to focus on helping you with ShopMagic on-boarding and everyday usage by providing docs and contact options right from the plugin dashboard:
Stay tuned!
