We are excited to announce availability of 1.2.0 Beta of Patreon WordPress!
This is a major release that brings exciting new features as well as a lot of fixes and enhancements!
Highlights
The major new feature of this version are the new ways to lock your content.
Now you can lock content by active membership start date, total historical pledge amount in addition to the existing simple lock with $ level!
Here is the guide to new options
These new options allow you to lock your content in a total of 4 different ways. For any combination you use, the plugin will let users know how a particular content is locked, what is required from them to unlock, and why they are entitled to the content or why they are not.
Now any part of your website can be locked using the new direct lock feature
Earlier versions allowed you to only lock content that was in the form of posts or custom posts. Now you can lock any part of your website - widget content, sidebars, content inside header, footer, content inside posts, category, tag, post listing, search pages - anything, by using the new direct lock feature.
This requires knowing some coding however, since it requires some code to be entered in relevant sections in your theme or plugin code where you want to unlock. A help thread for this feature is coming up in the next few days.
Performance enhancements
Various functions were changed to allow better performance for every page load. These changes should amount to a noticeable increase in page load speed for logged in users.
Numerous improvements
Creator’s access token is now auto refreshed to prevent service disruption, security cookie was removed to prevent cookie errors, a message is displayed to the user in case Patreon cant be contacted during unlock flow, and many more.
We think that the collection of new features, improvements and fixes in this version will empower you to take your WordPress site and its Patreon integration to new heights!
How to test out the Beta
(Please note that if you have Patron Pro, you will have to disable it while testing 1.2.0 beta - its not compatible yet, and when it is, it will be announced)
1 - First, download the beta package provided below.
2 - Make sure to deactivate & delete all existing instances of Patreon WordPress.
3 - Upload and activate the zip package you uploaded above.
4 - Done - you shouldnt need to do any configuration changes since all your settings should have been kept intact.
5 - Give a test drive to the plugin and please report back any issues you find or any suggestions you have!
6 - When 1.2.0 is out, you will need to deactivate & delete the 1.2.0 beta you have, and install 1.2.0 from your WP plugin admin
Full changelog included below:
= 1.2.0 =
- Now compatible with Patreon API v2
- Patron info related calls to API made to work using v2 - they currently work without needing to upgrade tokens to v2
- New advanced locking option based on total historical pledge of patrons added
- New advanced locking option based on membership start date of patrons added
- New advanced locking options made work in conjunction with each other to provide a total of 4 locking options
- New advanced locking options added to post locking interface
- Locked content interface now takes into account the new locking options - a proper text is shown to user for each locking case (simple lock, membership start date, total pledge etc)
- Post locking interface now uses a jQuery “Show/Hide Advanced” toggle to keep interface clean
- “Show/Hide Advanced” toggle now remembers user preference
- Existing locking option and new locking options linked to help document from post metabox
- New method for directly locking any part of content or site added - now anything can be locked, not only posts or custom post types. A part of the theme or content can be locked for any given pledge level by using some code (content in sidebars, widgets, header, footer, inside posts etc)
- Compatibility class to hold compatibility related code added
- Do not cache variable added to compatibility class to tell caching plugins to not cache critical Patreon related routing pages (flow, auth)
- Cache control / no cache headers added to headers for Patreon routing pages (flow, auth)
- Added update available notice to tell site owners that a new version is available (dismissable until next update check)
- API v2 accessibility checking functions removed since API v2 is now always being used for patron related calls
- Creator’s token refresh code removed from getPatreonCreatorInfo
- Code added to keep track of expiration of creator’s access token
- Function added to refresh creators token before it expires to prevent any connectivity issues related to expiration - now it will auto refresh when necessary
- Function that checked creator’s url on every page load was removed - this should reduce load
- Function which retrieves patron’s details from Patreon on every page load made to do the check every 24 hours instead of every page load - this should reduce load
- Hooks and filters added to Patreon login action that happens in WordPress site after Patreon oAuth
- All API access error cases covered with error messages
- Security cookie check removed to address issues with sites experiencing problems with cookies
- lock_or_not function to receive a post id and decide whether a content should be locked is added
- lock_or_not function now returns the reason why content was locked (not enough pledge, membership start not old enough, not enough total pledge, declined etc)
- All interface functions in locked content interface are made to use lock_or_not function and are simplified
- All interface generating functions made to receive post id so now they can be used programmatically to generate interface for any content - not only the current post
- Error message added in case Patreon does not return a result or WP site cannot connect to Patreon. This will prevent parse errors when this situation happens
- User agent string added to oAuth calls
- Message added to creators that they are seeing the post because they are the creator - for when they log in with creator account
- Unlock button CSS was updated to prevent themes from overriding its size. This will fix issues in sites where the button was showing up too large or too long
- Fixed patronage checking function not returning a value for catch-all case
- get_user_pledge_relationship_start function added to get membership relationship start from v2 API
- Fixed interface text for declined patrons not being used
- Redundant duplicate text for locked content was removed from custom banner part of the interface in cases when no custom banner was entered in plugin options
- fetch_user call uses API v2 with v1 tokens without needing to upgrade to v2
- fetch_creator_info uses still API v1 with v1 tokens - to be revisited in future
- New routing case added to enable direct unlocks
- Numerous more minor fixes and changes