GDPR

We discussed the various articles of the European Union General Data Protection Regulation and how they can be addressed by Paid Memberships Pro in our software and as a company. It was a good discussion. I will be writing up a more detailed post including what I feel needs to be addressed for our software to comply with the GDPR. Some of the action items for this could be done collaboratively between ourselves and other ecommerce plugin authors. So I will pursue that while making sure PMPro is ready by the deadline in May.

Multiple Memberships Per User Updates and Add On Compatability Roadmap

The MMPU Add On has been working well in it’s beta release on several sites for the past 6 months or so. In the next few weeks, we will launch the add on officially with the known caveat that many of our add ons will not work as expected with the MMPU Add On active.

We will be tagging all our add ons on this site to show which are compatible with MMPU, which will never be compatible with MMPU (because it doesn’t make sense or would be too technically difficult), and which we will be working on.

Our hope it that over the next year or so, with the help of the developer community, we can update the add ons that need it. To that end, we will be sharing case studies on our blog as we do this work so we can compare notes and share methods.

Becoming a Partner, New Agreement Contract and Plans

Until now, we’ve had adhoc agreements with the development partners showcased on our Developers page. We appreciate the role these developers play in the PMPro community. Our partners are responsible for building the best examples of sites running Paid Memberships Pro, working with us to address new markets and use cases, and so much more. Our goal is to formalize the relationship we have with the partners and gather resources to work on shared marketing projects.

Freelancers and agencies interested in joining our developer network can apply here.

Idea for Stripe Integration

We discussed the possibility of at checkout, checking for an existing customer record using the same email address before creating a new customer in Stripe. Some of this was coded in a development branch while working to fix synchronization issues between PMPro and Stripe. The synchronization issues were addressed by other fixes, but it still might be useful to reuse Stripe customer records instead of creating a new one when a user checks out in PMPro.

PMPro does keep track of a user’s customer id and reuses it if that customer checks out again. However, if you integrate several sites with Stripe, each site will have it’s own customer record for that same person.

Many of us agreed that it’s best to stick to the current system of creating a new unique customer id the first time a user checks out in PMPro. If we use a customer record managed by another app, we can’t be sure what that other app might do with the customer or their subscriptions. Also, the Stripe API does not allow you to do a straightforward search for customer id by email address. The implementation we had used a kind of hack where we would download all customers and their email addresses for cross reference. It seems that Stripe doesn’t want to encourage this kind of behavior.

A script to resync customer ids by email address might be useful in a pinch for cases where PMPro went out of sync with Stripe. (An example might be if someone is importing users from another system or otherwise had to delete and recreate WordPress users.)

We also briefly discussed the need to explore the Stripe Connect platform, which has some benefits over the direct API method we use of integrating with Stripe. Namely, users who have a credit card stored in Stripe would be able to checkout very quickly. There is also the fact that Stripe might require or strong encourage use of Stripe Connect in their temrs of service.

Scheduling for Future Dev Chats

Instead of a regularly scheduled dev chats, we are now keeping a list of topics for discussion. When the list hits 3 items, we will schedule a dev chat to go over those topics. If there is something you would like to discuss with the PMPro developer community, let us know through our contact form and we will add it to the list.

Thanks again to everyone who attended today.

The first chat is being held tomorrow.

Rather than post the raw transcript, I’m going to start posting a summary from our dev chats. We hold these chats roughly once a month at paidmembershipspro.slack.com. We’re working on an easier way to join the Slack group, but for now you can get Jason to add you by posting a comment on a blog post like this one.

Here is the summary from our dev chat on December 15, 2015.

• Theme music was the album Vitals by Mutemath.
• The audio from the bbPress webinar came out poorly so Jason is going to rerecord, but instead of doing the customizations as gists, he’s been working to add all of the functionality from the gists as settings in the core plugin. The updated version of PMPro bbPress and the video walkthrough should be up this week.
• Last week, Jason published a blog post with our plans to improve our synchronization with PayPal.
• Jason reiterated his intent to “focus on making what we already have better”, including those PayPal updates, improvements to how JS code is used so it can be minimized, optimizations around how options are handled, and other performance improvements.
• Harsha is working on the PMPro VAT add on and hope to have an update soon.
• Jason mentioned that the wp_pmpro_membership_levelmeta table and functions are in the core PMPro plugin now. They aren’t being used by anything yet, but we should see add ons start using these functions instead of storing things in the wp_options table.
• Jason mentioned that the GitHub repository for the Memberlite theme is now public. Jason is working on a plan to offer the theme for free somehow. For the time being, you’ll still need a PMPro Plus membership to download it on the Paid Memberships Pro site.
• The group discussed issues with the Import Users From CSV plugin (specifically problems importing CSV files encoded for Mac). Jason will reach out to the developers about adopting the plugin to fix some of the issues since it is so crucial to imports for PMPro.
• Jason mentioned two takeaways from his WordCamp US trip: (1) learn about unit testing and (2) work with some hosts for better membership caching.
• Jason mentioned moving Zapier integration up in priority since it would offer a way to export to Quickbooks and also services like ActiveCampaign, which is becoming popular.
• Slack user @neila from New Jersey joined the discussion and introduced himself.
• Jason gave a shout out to @pete, who has been volunteering support on the wordpress.org forums for PMPro. Thanks, Pete!
• The webinar today is on adding new payment gateways.
• Neil asked “If one should create an addon can it be sold as an extension to pmpro or is that against pmpro policy? Or will you guys create a third party marketplace where devs can subscribe for a fee perhaps to sell themes, extensions etc.” Jason replied, “You can sell the extension on your own site. We’d like to know about it, but there are no restrictions on you selling it outside of what the GPL license implies. A third party marketplace of some sort might be there in the future, but we haven’t thought about it much. Although there are a few people selling addons now or otherwise maintaining addons, so a way to make it more official would be nice. Hard with our current core/plus model though.”
• An important core PMPro update was released yesterday fixing a bug for Payflow Pro users that was introduced in v1.8.6.8.
• An important update to the PMPro Register Helper add on was released yesterday with a few bug fixes and enhancements, including a fix for a bug introduced in WP v4.4 that came up if you had a field named “title”.