It’s about time I tell you what I’ve been up to!
I’ve been working a lot lately on the Million Dollar Script. I’ve been doing a lot of work for people and adding various customizations to their sites and helping them out as well as fixing bugs in MDS 2.1 that we find along the way. You can already download most of these fixes with the latest version. If you find any more issues please report them so that I can fix them.
I’m also still working on the next big thing. Million Dollar Script 3.0 has taken far too long to create and I really, really want to get it done soon so I’ve been working on it a lot. Below I’m going to write about some of the things I’ve been doing with it.
One of the things I’ve done is I’ve separated the WooCommerce support into it’s own separate plugin. One of the main reasons Million Dollar Script 3.0 is taking so long is due to the WooCommerce support I’m adding to it. For those unfamiliar with it this is the WordPress plugin it’s going to use to handle orders and payments. It just so happens that the way I decided to do it had caused me to run into just about every bug imaginable in WooCommerce. So after struggling with that for quite some time I started trying new ways of doing it. None were really feeling too good to me or necessarily very flexible or even user friendly and it just wasn’t working out like I wanted. So finally I decided to just completely extract the WooCommerce functionality into it’s own plugin and have MDS be able to make orders on it’s own. It won’t handle payments on it’s own though, but if you want to you can manually process those or write a plugin to integrate your own payment system into it. Or you can just install the MDS WooCommerce plugin and WooCommerce itself and use that which will be free for everyone. Also this way I can possibly make other plugins for other ecommerce solutions to integrate into MDS in the future if necessary.
In fact that is another thing I had to work on. When you install the MDS WooCommerce plugin, if you don’t have WooCommerce installed it will recognize that and suggest to install it and even offer to install it for you. Most people seem to use TGMPA for that sort of thing but it seemed to be having some issues for me. So I eventually stumbled across My Plugin Manager which seems to do the trick nicely. It’s supposed to be simpler which is usually a good thing and it looks and feels more modern too.
In creating the WooCommerce plugin I also created some features for MDS plugins to add their own settings fields to the Million Dollar Script settings page, as well as the grid fields and order fields. They can hook into these areas using filters and add their own fields to them. It uses CMB2 to handle creation of custom fields but you won’t have to download that plugin since it’s embedded into the MDS code. So you don’t have to deal with that unless you’re wanting to make a plugin for MDS and want to add your own fields to various MDS screens.
Another thing that I’ve done in the process was rewrite some of the build script. This also isn’t something you or anyone who uses MDS would ever care about unless perhaps you’re coding on it or building plugins and want to use the automated build script. I use a software called Phing in my IDE (PhpStorm) to automate the build process. The build process consists of updating all the file headers, such as versions, copyright dates, etc. and copying the files to a build folder as well as compressing the files. It does this for the main Million Dollar Script plugin as well as addon plugins such as the MDS WooCommerce plugin. Then it can either copy these files locally to another folder or upload them through SSH or even FTP if necessary. Then it will extract the files onto the server.
Something else the build script does is use Goolgle’s Closure Compiler to minify the OpenSeadragon JavaScript files. I was having an issue using the latest java version of it for some reason or another so I switched to the Windows version which never existed before in the old version I updated it from. Now all is well again in the minification department.
Also you may have noticed I redesigned the site again. I switched to the Divi theme from the Pro theme. I really like them both a lot. Pro comes with a lot of nice premium plugins and has some nice features. However, by using Divi I can get rid of a bunch of extra plugins because it has those features built into it already. It seems to make things a little quicker to work with and simpler in a lot of ways. I like it’s builder interface and the fact I can export and import all the various settings and whatnot. It also feels like more active development and whatnot. I’ve seen people complain about it being slow but it seems just fine for me. I think maybe it’s just their site setup or their host or network or something else causing the issues. Then again, maybe they just have different options selected than I do. Either way I like it! Plus I can install it with the MDS 2.1 WordPress integration if you happen to order it and you’ll continue to get updates for Divi because that’s how they work. So that’s another really good thing about it too.
OK I could probably keep going on and on about this or that but the sooner I stop typing, the sooner I can go do the things I have to do so that I can work on MDS 3.0 some more in the future. And right now the things I have to do include sleeping all day and waking up to eat supper. So off I go! Have a great day!