This mid-month release includes a handful of usability improvements and some small bugfixes.

My Account, Cart, and Checkout pages now automatically set to the wide template

This release sets the My Account, Cart, and Checkout pages on your sites to use the one-column wide template automatically. This helps make sure there’s enough room for the content on these auto-generated pages, without requiring extra steps.

WooCommerce Name Your Price & Stripe Gateway plugins now optional

Newspack’s Reader Revenue tools no longer require installing the WooCommerce plugins Name Your Price and Stripe Gateway to use. These plugins will continue to be installed on hosted Newspack sites, so nothing will change on sites we currently host. This update makes the overall Newspack platform a little more flexible for different setups.

Sites that choose not to install one or both of these plugins will need to consider the following:

• The Name Your Price plugin is required to offer different amounts for the Donate block, and to allow readers to customize their donation amounts. Without this plugin, the Donate block will only display one price instead of tiers for one-time, monthly, and annual donations, and donors will not be able to add their own.
• If Stripe Gateway is not used, at least one other payment gateway that can be used to process subscriptions must be installed and activated on the site to allow readers to make ongoing purchases like donations.

Magic links will bring readers back to where they started from

By clicking the Reader Activation Sign In button, readers can opt to get a ‘magic link’ to allow them to log into their account without having to remember a password. Going forward, these magic links will take note of the page they’re generated on, so once a reader clicks that link and it logs them in, they’ll be brought back to the page they started from.

Exclude custom taxonomies from the Homepage Post block

By default, the Homepage Post block will allow you to exclude posts from WordPress’s standard taxonomies like Categories and Tags. With this release, the Blocks plugin will also check for the plugins you have installed, and add options to exclude any custom taxonomies those plugins may include.

This feature will allow you to exclude specific sponsors from the blocks if you’re using the Newspack Sponsors plugin, or specific brands if you’re using Newspack Multibranded Site.

Any custom taxonomies will appear under the block’s ‘Show Advanced Filters’ settings, after the fields to exclude posts with specific categories or tags:

Update “Total Spent” and “Last Payment Amount/Date” values in synced data

This release includes a bugfix to make sure that only successful transactions are synced to your ESP. This means if an unsuccessful transaction happens (like a failed donation), it won’t be pushed to the ESP as the “Last Payment Amount” or “Last Payment Date” since it’s neither.

Other general bugfixes & tweaks

The Streamlined Donate block has been removed from the Blocks plugin

As a final piece to our Stripe Subscriptions deprecation, the Streamlined Donate block has been removed from the Newspack Blocks plugin. This option was only available if you were using Stripe Subscriptions to manage donations, and it was an early version of a simplified checkout process. It has since been replaced with the Modal Checkout, a checkout experience that’s available with any of our supported payment providers, not just Stripe.

Links in image credits no longer open in a new tab

To follow website usability best practices, links in the Image Credit field will now open in the current tab. This makes sure browser tools like the ‘Back’ button continue to work as expected.

Next release cycle

Our next set of releases will be coming out the week of March 4th. Until then,

– The Newspack Product team