Monthly Wrapup: February at Tyche Softwares

Hola! It’s March and we want to say ‘This year is flying by’ but we won’t. Some of you have achieved all your goals, others may be ambling along, while some of you, like us, may be taking steps towards long-term plans. Here’s a quick monthly wrapup on the technical, non-technical and bordering-on-personal updates from Tyche Softwares.

Over all, it was a special month for us as we celebrated a year into moving our current office space in Borivali, Mumbai, a milestone in itself. Personally, I re-launched my personal blog (check it out here) and even wrote a review of 2018.

We celebrated two birthdays, got together to have fun just as much as we got together to work and bring the best of our plugins to you.

1. Technical Updates

Here’s what happened on the tech front.

Abandoned Cart Plugin

Version 7.13.0 of the Abandoned Cart plugin was released on February 19, 2019, a security release which included a performance upgrade that would decrease the load on the server CPU when sending reminders. Sanitization checks were added for the checkout field capture for guest users, and lastly, there is an improvement in statistics on the Recovered Orders and Abandoned Orders page on the dashboard.

Check out the complete changelog here.

Note: We have also revamped the structure and content of our Abandoned Cart sales page. Notice a difference?

Order Delivery Date Plugin

Version 9.4 of the Order Delivery Date plugin was released on February 28, 2019. A new hook ‘ordd_add_to_custom_holiday_str’ was added to modify the holidays to be disabled on the checkout page calendar.

Besides, there were 13 bug fixes. These included fixes related to open-ended time slots, time slot meta being replaced by custom order meta field, double events being created when the order status changed to ‘processing’, malfunctioning of the minimum delivery hours option on the time slots and more. Check the complete changelog here.

Product Delivery Date Plugin 

Version 3.0 was released on February 1, 2019, including two enhancements and 15 bug fixes.

As part of the enhancements, the delivery settings can be added for multiple products together from the ‘Bulk Product Settings’ tab on the Product Delivery Date -> Settings menu, and ‘Tomorrow’s Deliveries’ will now be visible to the admin under ‘View Deliveries’.

Bugs such as base price of the composite product not being added to the total order amount, welcome page show to users besides the admin, miscalculations in prices for composite products, and others, were fixed.

View all the fixes here.

2. The Progress of the Book Club

You must have read about our book reading club in one of our previous posts. In February, we read and (almost) completed Radhakrishnan Pillai’s Chanakya In You, the story of a man who is inspired by the Arthashastra and makes it his guiding light in life.

While relatable and easy to read, the book lacked the mainstay of any good novel – the conflict. The narrator’s life breezes ahead far too easily and the singular point of view makes it very monotonous.

However, it was not a complete waste of time. We learnt of several teachings of Chanakya, little philosophies on life. Perhaps a few more quotations from his teachings would have added more weight to the story and helped readers connect the dots better.

3. New Blog Posts to check out

While we were reading new things, we were also writing them. We published 14 blog posts in February, some technical, others that covered the larger e-commerce spectrum, a case study and more. Check them out:

1. In this case study, events and catering services provider Marigolds & Onions tell you how to take a 25-year-old business online, and do it successfully.
2. Digital strategist Freddie Tubbs tells you the 6 WooCommerce SEO mistakes to avoid.
3. Thinking of expanding your business? We did a six-part series on the online marketplaces of the world covering the US, Europe, Asia, the Middle-East, Africa and Australia.

We also wrote several blog posts on how to tweak and customize your WooCommerce store with just a few code snippets:

1. How to add text to the category description in WooCommerce.
2. How to link the Add to Cart button from the Category and Shop pages to the Product pages.
3. Filtering WooCommerce orders by multiple order statuses.
4. Formatting WooCommerce prices.
5. Making fields ‘Required’ or ‘Optional’ on the WooCommerce Checkout page.
6. Hide prices on WooCommerce Shop and Category pages.

That was our February, all about loving our team, our work and our customers. How was yours?