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May 25, 2016 | 3 minute read
written by Jamie Holdroyd
Before continuing, if you happened to miss it here’s last week’s post.
Flows is one of our most popular features and many of you have been letting us know how you’d like to see it improve going forward. Firstly, it’s being totally re-written to make it much more performant. As it is a core part of the platform, this will also result in major improvements to the system as a whole. Secondly, we’re improving the current field types as well as adding more to the list. Best of all we’re implementing Flow types, allowing you to create and implement specific fields for different entries without having to have unused global options.
For example, if you were to create a subscription product and wanted to store specific information against it. Right now you would add a few additional fields to the core product flow, which would be left blank on other entries. With Flow Types, you can create a set of fields and attach them to one or more entries, including validation, required and more without having to keep them around when they’re not needed.
We’ve had a basic implementation of shipping since we launched and this has worked pretty well, however, with an increase in use cases we’re now starting to see some limitations. Version two will see us improve the table rate shipping, implementing better configuration and optimization of packing boxes, as well as integrations for live rates with third-party providers.
A lot of the feedback we’ve received recently has been about our taxation system, which works to an extent but you’ve suggested lots of ways it can improve. We’re working on a major update to give you lots more configuration options, more control over rates, exclusions and even automated tax calculations for certain countries (yes you, America).
At the moment you can only process payments for an order but with version two you’ll be able to use the payment aggregation service directly, with four times more gateways supported. We know there’s lots of you who will really benefit from this change and we can’t wait to see how it gets used.
Yes, there’s also lots of smaller changes being made to the system too. Whilst they don’t all need to be mentioned, some of them include more control and triggers for webhooks, improved image manipulation via our CDN, and carts will now be cross region and support custom products.
The past two weeks have seen us cover most of the headline features coming in version two. Many of you have asked for us to keep you informed of what’s in development and this is just the start of us doing that. Post-launch, we’ll be publicly announced for the first time, allowing you more opportunities to contribute and vote on what you’d like to see next.
Next week we’ll be sharing a first look at the new schema we’re working towards and in the coming weeks we’ll be discussing the testing schedule, how to give feedback, SDK updates and documentation.
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