Website Updates for January

Howdy all,

I'm gonna start posting update reports about once a month for changes to the website, as it seems like it'll be a while before things settle into the old groove of "no changes for months at a time". This is kind of a good thing, as it means the site is reasonable to improve over time; Drupal is still a pain to work with a lot of the time, and I'm finding things that seem like they should be simple to implement just aren't. But, it is at least fixable, most of the time (the old Drupal 6 site was too fragile to touch!).

OK, so on with the updates:

• Cloudmin Connect now appears correctly in the Software Licenses page. This was quirky and much harder to fix than I expected due to the way Views filters work with empty fields in the database, and required modifications to a number of components in our license manager and shopping cart, and an update to our software licenses database.
• Cloudmin licenses are now appearing correctly. This is related to the above. Adding Cloudmin Connect led to some Cloudmin licenses disappearing from the list entirely! This was a UI visibility issue, and did not effect any actual licenses (sometimes purchased licenses wouldn't show up; they existed, they just weren't being shown). This is fixed.
• Licenses still aren't being properly associated with orders. This one has me temporarily stumped, but I'll try to get it fixed by the 7th when newly purchased monthly subscriptions start renewing. This is directly related to license upgrades for all licenses and renewals for old (pre-Drupal 7) licenses, which is a high priority for getting fixed, since it currently requires manual intervention to upgrade any license or to renew old licenses.
• Table of contents is back on some of the Documentation pages, though still a little quirky. The table of contents module we were using on the old site is not compatible with PHP 5.6+, and I don't know how to fix it, so we had to switch to another one. This one is not quite as automatic or as nice looking; but it is much more customizable, so we'll get it working nicely and for all pages in the near future.
• Discounts and coupons are still not working. I had planned to roll them out last week, but that couldn't happen. My devel server has the coupons module installed, and it was kinda working for about a week (though not in the way I wanted it to work, so it was going to need some customization), but it's now causing fatal errors on the checkout page. Still working on it. Not sure if it's related to the PHP upgrade (as with the tableofcontents module) or some other changes I made along the way. This is the kind of fragility that makes me continue to be uncomfortable relying on Drupal for anything, and make me think we'll need to migrate to something else eventually.
• A variety of backend improvements have been added (and are being migrated from my devel server over the next few days) to allow Eric and Jamie the ability to do stuff that currently has me as a bottleneck (license and order related stuff). This will hopefully improve support response time about license issues by not having to wait on me to deal with them. These updates aren't all in place yet, but will be coming online during this week. Also money-related stuff (like refunds or order price adjustments) can now be handled by Eric.
• Also in development for release this coming week: Ability to cancel your own recurring orders and delete cards from "stored cards" (note that we don't actually see or store your card data...this has been a common concern; we use Braintree's drop-in payment UI, which gives us a token for recurring payments...we never see your payment data, and it is stored by Braintree/PayPal). Editing and adding payment types is a little farther off, but I'm working on it on the development server (unfortunately, the Braintree drop-in UI payment gateway module for Drupal Commerce is minimally maintained and is currently incomplete, so I'm having to write a lot of code myself).

Keep filing bugs about problems you run into. I may be slow when it comes to Drupal development, but problems do get fixed!

Cheers,

Joe