YAK 2.1.1 has just been released. Some fairly comprehensive changes have gone into this version. On the stability/security side of things, YAK now uses WP’s SQL “prepare” facility (this is to stop things like SQL injection attacks). From a bug fix perspective, you’ll notice the product edit form (when editing a post) is now draggable (thanks to a contributor), and promo price calculation had a bug in some environments which should now be resolved.

In terms of new features, I’ve added public key encryption for storage of CC details. With the recent news about WordPress blogs hacked on a shared host (http://blogcastfm.com/announcements/warning-massive-number-of-godaddy-wordpress-blogs-hacked-this-weekend/), and various comments about many people on shared web hosts who don’t secure their WP config files properly, it seems prudent to provide the facility for more security for users of the manual CC payment feature. YAK settings are now split into 4 separate screens (General, Shipping, Sales Tax, Advanced) — on the Advanced tab you’ll find a button for generating a public/private key. The public key can be used for encrypting CC numbers, and the private key for decrypting. I’ll be adding some more detail to the FAQ at some point soon.

I’ve also added the facility to require a login for certain products, added more values to the third-party-integration event, and also incrementing item quantity (rather than displaying an error message) when the customer clicks on the buy button for an item which is already in the cart (configurable, of course). The biggest feature addition is the first version of sales tax calculations. This works in a vaguely similar way to shipping (except without the zones), but also provides for federal and state based taxes for the US. If your country has a similar requirement (state versus federal taxes), let me know, and hopefully I can fit that into a subsequent release.

Version 1.7.7 of YAK for WordPress has been released.

This release includes mainly bug fixes, including the following:

• Hopefully fix a problem with glob (on some PHP installs)
• Move order widget into separate file
• Change “Espana” into “Spain” in English files.
• Fix problem with country missing from shipping address in confirmation email and in order screen
• Add a new tag [phone] to confirmation email
• Fix a problem with address in order export
• Add message to Credit Card entry notifying the customer that they have a final chance to confirm/cancel the order
• Updated German translation, provided by Joern

This release has been tested on both WP and WPMU.

YAK version 1.7.1 has just been released. This release (and the previous 1.7.0) includes the following changes:

• Fixing a problem with Authorize.net url
• Add checkbox for Authorize.net test mode
• Separate PayPal Pro return url (from Standard)
• Refactor payment types into separate classes to allow for easier extensibility
• Minor change to ipaddress sent to PayPal (only affects internal testing)
• Add ‘demo’ payment gateway
• Fix promo date saving problem
• Fix promo price calculation (causing problems in PayPal)
• Automatically create the Checkout page on activation
• Automatically create the “products” and “default” categories on activation
• Fix (hopefully) an odd error_log problem in certain environments

Enjoy!

If you happened to download/install version 1.2.3, make sure you install 1.2.4 which fixes an address bug in PayPal. Of course, if you’re not using PayPal, you don’t need to bother… and if you’re using the latest version of WP, you probably already know…

As a matter of interest I went back and had a look at the number of downloads for the earlier versions of YAK, back when it was hosted at SourceForge. The number was a lot higher than I remembered and, added to the 4781 (at time of writing) downloads since WordPress has been hosting it, means the 10,000-downloads milestone came and went… completely uncommented upon.

YAK is now (almost officially) a three year old project. I started the SourceForge project (March 06) about a month or so after I’d started mucking around with the code itself. It started, from a rather simple idea, and over time has turned into a product that, I believe, is reasonably competitive in terms of features. Not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but good enough for a part-time project that has only had time to evolve, rather than be properly designed.

YAK looks a bit like an “also-ran” compared to the number of downloads for the alternative cart plugins on WordPress, but when you look at the real figure (currently 11,635) it’s actually almost holding its own. Not quite so sure why it rates so low (I certainly haven’t received an enormous number of complaints, and I’ve attempted to fix most, if not all, of the bugs that have been reported) — could be the lack of free documentation, or something else I haven’t thought of.

Still, to the few thousand or so people (I’m guessing) who have amassed 11,000+ downloads over the last few years, to the (unfortunately smaller ) number who have bought the handbook, and the various contributors who have offered patches, bug fixes, translations, suggestions, etc — thanks for all your support.

YAK for WordPress version 1.2.3 has finally been released. Features include in this release, since the last stable version (1.1.3) include:

• a basic xml feed for products
• remote function for retrieving the content of a product from another YAK store
• Accounts Receivable payment type
• Authorize.net payment type
• PayPal Payments Pro payment type
• fix zip code/state handing in PayPal for US addresses
• add state to address form (automatic switch between state and region depending upon country code)
• add more filtering to the order administration page
• Norwegian translation, provided by Tom Boersma
• updated French translation, provided by Romaric Drigon

Bug fixes include:

• price formatting in confirmation message
• minor problem in reports
• layout issue with out-of-stock message
• minor problem with 2.7 layout
• fix dodgy address handling, explicitly store country codes for PayPal address problem

Download as usual from the WordPress Extend site, here.

YAK 1.2.0-beta is now downloadable from the WordPress Plugins Directory.

At the moment, this release includes: a basic xml feed and the facility to pull product details from those feeds into another YAK installation; an accounts receivable payment type; support for Authorize.net and PayPal Payments Pro; along with a few bug fixes.

Note: this is a beta release, so test well if you want to install on a production site.

I’ve finally added both PayPal Pro and Authorize.net support to YAK — which means users who don’t want to redirect their customers to an external site (ala PayPal Standard and Google Checkout), can now provide a more seamless payment process.

If anyone is interested in testing this functionality, please let me know (see the Contact page). I can provide basic setup/configuration information, but you’ll probably need to read the requisite integration docs for whichever gateway you want to test.

I’ve just added (the beginnings of) a new feature to YAK (user-funded development) that will probably only be useful to one or two users — but it’s worth mentioning anyway.

REMOTE SERVER NOT SET is a new tag which can be used in a product post. This allows you to set up a store on one blog, then use the products (posts) on another. The basic idea is that you can have a central store with all your products, then separate (smaller) sites which pull in specific relevant products. When you click the buy button on the smaller site you are, of course, redirected to the central store.

There are 2 fundamental limitations:

1. it currently only works with libcurl (thus your PHP install must have curl enabled)
2. there is no way (at the moment) to redirect back to the original site. For example, the central store might be setup on site A, and 2 or 3 specific products linked on site B. A customer clicks the buy button on a product in site B, and is redirected to the shopping cart on A. At which point the cart should present a link to return the customer to the calling page.

Usage of the new function will be as follows:

1. On the Yak->Settings, under the Advanced tab, set a remote server and path. For example:

http://myserver.com

/myblog

2. In a post, use the tag: [yak_get_remote_n] where n is the id of the post in the remote store. For example:

[yak_get_remote_9]

Which will embed the content of post #9.

The new functionality does point toward a necessity for affiliate functionality (as briefly mentioned here) — but that’s a much larger effort that may need to wait. The new tag is currently in the repository, and will appear in the next release of YAK.

This post is to capture (in one place) a number of features (and thoughts around those features) that have been suggested for future versions for YAK, both via email, and on the Suggestions page. It may also spark further discussion. Presented in no particular order:

• Affiliates program – setup affiliates in YAK settings (select from registered users), then affiliates would be able to login to your WP admin panel and view their progress, perhaps setup keywords to manage a campaign? Not sure here. I favour a simple approach as much as possible, but it very much depends on whether a simple approach provides any value. This is probably one of those features that might have to wait until someone wants to fund the development, because it’s only a real user who’s going to come up with something that actually might be useful in the real world.
• Better address configuration — which fields should be included, how they should be labelled (over and above the i18n labelling). Which leads onto…
• Better WP integration — a registered user could enter their address, and this would be used when ordering. Which, as a by-product, should mean that a user could login and see their order details (i.e. order tracking).
• Multiple shipping options — at the very least provide for a configurable number of shipping options. Better yet, provide hooks for alternative shipping engines.
• Tax Calculation — calculating the Infernal Revenue Services’ cut of your sales isn’t something YAK does at all, at the moment, which has been a problem for some. At the very least, a simple tax calculation engine would allow you to specify a tax percentage for a country (have to add states, for the United States and Australia), but would this be enough? Feedback sort on this particular possibility.
• Workflow — at the moment we have “Send Stock”, “Cancel Order” and “Reset”. Are those enough? I started an email discussion with a user about a year ago about workflow, but they never replied after an initial couple of messages.
• Order filtering — the ability to specify date ranges, display today’s orders by default, etc (suggestions?)
• Product filtering — at the very least, a pick list of the alphabet for filtering at the top
• Export — csv(?) export of your orders, your customers, and perhaps your product list. The latter may not be necessary, if I come up with something reasonable in terms of an xml feed for products.
• WordPress MU compatibility — only if I find a step-by-step installation guide that’s any good…
• Cart widget — display the current basket contents (summary) on the page.
• More download options — one request has been to allow for a configurable email to be sent out (rather than a download link). I was also thinking about tokens for support activities (i.e. buy a support token), which lead me onto the idea of creating a semi-secure sub-page of the download product (in this case a “support product”) where customer and technician can discuss the job. Useful for me, and at least one other user I’ve talked to, but it’s a fairly limited domain, so not sure about adding it as a core feature.
• Checkout navigation breadcrumbs (suggested by Chris). Fairly easy to add, so this will go up the priority list.
• Related products — “other products you may be interested in” (again suggested by Chris). Displayed when a customer adds to their basket.
• Additional gateways — one of authorise.net or PayPal Payments Pro integration. And fix Google Checkout so that we have end-to-end integration.
• SKU — I added product code quite a while ago, intending to use it for SKU, but it doesn’t make sense in light of multiple product types (one product with multiple types will have multiple SKUs). Adding SKU support also means adding the facility to search by SKU with a suitably nice URL (obviously time to brush up those mod rewrite skillz).
• Rewrite! Tidy up the codebase. Or start again with lessons learned from the past couple of years, and spend more time in the WP codebase to make sure YAK is consistent. This will happen once I win the lottery (considering I buy a lottery ticket about once every 1-3 years, calculate the probability for yourself )

And some additional stuff (not specifically related to development):

• Add discussion forums and move all the comments into the forums. I tried to do this before, but probably could’ve done it better, so might be worth trying again. Having 450 comments in General discussion is getting rather unwieldy.
• Site redesign — easier if WP properly supported multiple themes

I think that’s pretty much it. If there’s something I’ve missed that you think should be in this list, please leave a comment here. If anyone wants to fund development on one or more of these items, send me an email to discuss, otherwise you’ll have to wait until they trickle in over time.