Your Members 11 went gold early in the week and today it’s released for premium support customers with a more general release later in the week.
So what’s new in Your Members 11:
Setup Wizard
As part of Your Members 11 the dev team sat a complete Your Members novice down infront of a computer which was running a screen capture and followed them as they tried to install Your Members. A few issues cropped up but out of it comes the new setup bar allowing you to quickly get Your Members 11 up and running smoothly. If you have already setup YM just hit the red x at the top to make it go away you can reactivate it at any time via the about page.
Custom Registration Flows
By far the largest component in Your Members 11 custom registration flows allows you to take control of the registration flow to create your own multi page registration and upgrade forms. A site can have multiple forms for different users, each with their own logic, and allow you to select individual gateways and subscriptions. For more information check out this neat video of Barry originally posted when we launched the beta version of YM11
Also check Your Members custom registration flows for details of possible flows.
Bundles and coupons overhauls
Both bundles and coupons have had some major changes and new interfaces and features added specifically:
Coupons now have the ability to be applied not just to registration but also to upgrades, individual posts and bundles. In addition you can now set the number of times a coupon can be used.
Bundles have also had an overhaul, you can now set an expiry date at which point the user no longer has access to the bundle and if they wish to see the content will need to repurchase. The number of possible purchases of a bundle can be set and you can also now define if a user see’s new content added to the bundle or only content that was in the bundle at time of purchase. In effect bundles are now much more like a regular subscription (without reoccurring billing). Finally you can now add a post to a bundle from the write/edit page.
iFrame based Payment Gateways
With the launch of custom registration flows we have been able to bring in iFrame based hosted payments the first of which is PayPal Pro Hosted, for more information see Hosted Payments in iFrames
Invoice Gateway
The new Invoice gateway combines Your approval and the free gateway to allow you to take offline payments, or provide free but approval required access to your site.
Posting interface change
The Your Members widget on the write/edit screen hasn’t changed since YM1.3 and as such has been due a major overhaul with YM 11 the widget has been split into several sections and turned into a true WordPress widget this marks the last section of pre WordPress 2.5 code it also looks a lot nicer. For more details see our “posting Interface” blog post.
For the full list of improvements, bug fixes and new features check out the change log.
Installing YM11
As always backup before doing the update, if you have permissions set up to do so you can use the automated installer otherwise, remove the current YM folder (rename it) and upload the new one from the zip. This update has several DB changes to make to users so be aware it will take a few seconds to run the first time as it iterates through your user base to make the changes during the update your browser may refresh don’t panic it’s meant to!
Merry Christmas everyone
Tim has spent many years working as a consultant and trainer both in Web Development but also more esoteric fields such as Information Retrieval and Artificial Intelligence. He is current Coding Futures Technical Director and as such spends his day marshalling the development team.
For more information about Tim see their Google Profile or their full bio.