Welcome to the changelog section of Freemius, here you'll find our weekly technical update notes. You can subscribe to all posts via Newsletter or follow us on Twitter to stay updated.
We noticed a small bug in the system where the integration code shown would be invalid right after creating a new product in the Developer Dashboard. This was especially prevalent in the section where it asks to put the testing constants in the wp-config.php file.
As part of our release this week, we’ve fixed this bug.
We found an issue in the analytics system where the ‘Trial cancellations’ metric wasn’t getting indexed. We fixed the issue and you should be able to see trial cancellations on the Sales Analytics page.
Following our last security disclosure, we received feedback from our partners that they would like the security emails to be sent to a separate address. In response, we have added a new section in the “Profile” page of the Developer Dashboard.
From here, you can add an email address where Freemius will send you security-related notifications. Please note that Freemius will send the notification to both the main email as well as the “Security email”.
Following yet another bit of feedback, we’ve improved the areas in the Developer Dashboard where we present a dropdown for selecting a country. For example:
etc.
As you can see, you can now easily search for the country you intend to pick.
We’re super excited to bring you the most-requested analytics feature in the Developer Dashboard.
Starting today:
Previously, the server would round off the dates whenever you selected a date range that was not an hour or a day. For example:
This not only created confusion when viewing the charts and the UI (since they represented different dates), but we also had to restrict not showing the custom date picker in the main dashboard. This is because the rounded date range being shown there would not be the same as the selected dates.
After we enhanced the stats API, we can now provide data in any requested range and period that starts and/or ends at any date. The API will adjust the data to ensure it represents the requested date range instead of rounding it off.
As a result:
You can now get reports of aggregated data for any input.
As seen in the above image, the start date (and the data) of the chart now corresponds to the same date as the UI. To make it even easier to spot and avoid any confusion, we’re now showing the full date range when hovering over a chart point.
While working on the fix, we did some major refactoring of the underlying system. We realized we were doing many calculations ad-hoc and using more processing time than needed. During the refactoring, we made some adjustments and saw immediate improvements in the snappiness of the charts.
But no performance improvement is worth mentioning without a benchmark. So let’s see the results:
The benchmark itself was very simple. We took the main Net Payments & Transactions chart and hovered over the 7 data points while showing results for the last 7 days in Daily resolution. Co-incidentally, we also saw a 70% improvement in the rendering time 😁
Following upgrades of the dependencies, we noticed the New Bank Account… button on the Profile page was not working.
We fixed it in this iteration — apologies for any inconvenience!
We removed the code snippet that includes the secret_key of a product in the SDK integration code. Previously, we included an update to give clear instructions on how to activate development mode in the SDK.
We believe removing the secret_key from the main product file is the safer approach, since one can forget to remove it before doing manual deployments to the WordPress.org repository.
We fixed an integration issue with our Checkout Dunning app and the new security layer. Due to a bug in the system, the dunning app would be stuck in limbo when the security layer was throwing a reCAPTCHA error and would not show the UI to render the reCAPTCHA.
As a part of the fix, we also improved the error messages shown to the end user that may come from the firewall. The dunning app will also work well if the security layer asks for a 2FA authentication.
Over time, we’ve made improvements to our WordPress SDK and its integration code for both production and local development and testing.
Integrating the SDK with your WordPress plugin or theme for the first time can be slightly challenging — especially getting the correct flow of the Opt-In screen. By default, Freemius may send a confirmation email during opt-in. If you’re using a “local” email address in your localhost environment (like ‘[email protected]’) or the same email address you used to sign-up with Freemius, you might not receive the email, and the activation will be stuck.
However, skipping email activation in testing or development mode is easy. We need to put three constants in the wp-config.php file. Previously, the information about these was hidden on the SDK Integration page, far below.
To make it easier for first-time developers, we’ve rearranged the SDK Integration instructions in our Developer Dashboard.
The steps now clearly state what code you need to put inside your plugin/theme and what code you need to put inside the wp-config.php file.
This improvement of the Developer Dashboard was led by our new team member Aleksandr Manukyan who joined us as a full-stack engineer.
We made our blog a little faster by updating the under-the-hood build system. Hat tip to our new WordPress Developer Laurence Bahiirwa who led this.
Additionally, we also did a cleanup and sweeping to update some internal systems.
We added a new “Perk” to the “Partner Perks” section.
If you haven’t yet, please check the “Partner Perks” under the Profile menu on the top-right corner of the Developer Dashboard. This menu unlocks only after you’ve crossed a certain threshold with us and we provide discounts on various promotional sites, services, and products to help you grow your business.
We fixed a regression in the UI where the reCAPTCHA would not show up in some edge cases, even though the API server expects a reCAPTCHA.
We’ve made various under-the-hood improvements to the Freemius Checkout app. Here are the notable ones.
We’ve updated the error message to improve the UX when the server returns an error.
Previously, it was showing an obscure message. While the message was relevant to attackers, it was misleading to legit customers. We hope the new message will clearly indicate to a legit customer the next steps they need to take.
We found quite a few edge cases, where the 2FA mechanism was breaking the UX due to some browser policy. To make the 2FA work – regardless of whether the browser is blocking cookies – we completely overhauled the system. Now, the 2FA should work no matter if it is embedded in an iframe and regardless of whether the browser or some extension is blocking cookies.
We improved a few of the translations and their plural forms to make them compatible with transifex.
Following requests from our partners, we’ve updated the list of supported localhost and staging sites that come right out of the box from Freemius. We now also include the following providers:
You can read more about license utilization on staging/dev sites here.
We made some small but useful improvements to the new feature we rolled out last week: supporting localization in our checkout.
language will now serve as an alias to the locale parameter.https://checkout.freemius.com/...?language=fr as well as https://checkout.freemius.com/...?language=fr_FR.AWS announced a while back that TLS 1.2 will become the minimum requirement for all their API endpoints. We use AWS S3 to store assets like your product icons, store icons, screenshots etc. To ensure the smooth continuation of service, we audited our implementations and tested with a strict TLS 1.2 connection to the S3 API endpoints.
We have been serving asset URLs in protocol-relative formats, for example:
//s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/...
While this will continue to work in our own apps because we host our apps in a strict https environment, this can break image rendering if such links are used on a http page. To make the impact minimal, we will now be serving (both existing and new) all asset links with https URL format:
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/...
So in case, you’ve been adding the protocol to the URL for your own use case, please remove them and expect a full https URLs from our API.
As part of our Marketing Automation, we send an email when a license is about to expire. To make it convenient for the user, we include special authorized links to quickly update or add a payment method if it was not there already. This comes in handy for partners who migrate customers from other platforms.
As an enhancement to the system, we’ve added a check to not include pricing for licenses that do not have any values set. This came as a request from one of our partners who recently migrated to Freemius.