Happy 2024! In Newspack’s first release of the new year with a number of improvements including campaign revisions, allowing customers to switch subscriptions and update more information through My Account.

Allow rolling back to different campaign prompt revisions

In WordPress, regular posts and pages store revisions that you can access in the right sidebar. This is incredibly helpful if you need to roll back to a previous version of a page, or track down when a specific change happened and who made it.

When you’re editing a campaign prompt, a ‘Revisions’ panel will now display in the right sidebar once you’ve saved changes. This will capture any changes that are made to the prompt going forward. You can click it to review the prompts previous revisions, roll back changes or mark a revisions as ‘significant’ to make it easier to find later.

Display addresses in reader My Account settings, and allow editing

My Account now allows readers to view and edit their billing and shipping address information, if they have any saved.

Readers can view and edit their addresses by navigating to My Account > Addresses, and clicking the ‘Edit’ link above the appropriate address. WooCommerce will only show this section if a reader has at least one address saved, so it will only appear on sites collecting billing or shipping addresses. Unless your site sells products that can be shipped, most readers who have an address saved will only have the billing address.

Support empty values for the ‘Other’ amount Donate block

We’re deprecating customization options for the default “Other” value in the Donate block’s Tiered layout. The value should now always start empty so the donor can decide their donation amount without being anchored to a default amount. This helps avoid accidentally steering donors to lower donation amounts if the default is lower than they had planned to contribute.

While the “Other” field is empty, the “Donate now” button should be greyed out and disabled.

Make sure subscription switching is always available

For publishers using Newspack’s subscription or donation tools, their readers will now be able to easily change their payment cadence or amount on products that allow it (for example, a recurring donation amount, or a subscription product that has variable pricing/pricing the customer can already choose).

Readers can access this option by navigating to My Account > Subscriptions, picking a specific subscription they’d like to alter, and clicking the “Change Price” button. They’ll then be walked through a new checkout where they can change their donation amount or frequency.

You can turn this off on your site by navigating to WP Admin > WooCommerce > Settings > Subscriptions, and unchecking one or all of the “Allow Switching” options under the Switching header.

Add support for the Safety Net plugin

This release adds Automattic’s Safety Net plugin to our supported plugins list. This plugin’s role is strictly behind-the-scenes, and it helps make sure sites still under development don’t act like live sites in ways that can be insecure or unwanted. Some features of the Safety Net plugin include stopping sites from sending emails (so they’re not sent to migrated subscribers), pausing any payments in WooCommerce (if customers have been migrated over), and hiding the site from search engines.

Next release cycle

With the holidays wrapped, we’ll be getting back into our regular two-week release cycle, with the next release scheduled for the week of January 22nd. We wish you all the best for 2024!

– The Newspack Product team