Episode 82: The Future of EDD, Mergebot Updates, and Creating Your Own SSL Cert

Today, Brad and Pippin will be talking about what they’ve been up to the past few months, including things that have been going well and things that they’ve struggled with.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

The challenges that EDD faced when developing Commissions beta 3.4, as well as why the release was planned and developed.

What EDD is planning to release over the next year or two.

Brad’s newest blog post about creating your own certificate authority.

Details about Mergebot’s launch.

How Serialized Editor has helped Brad.

Details of the 2.8 release of EDD’s core plugin.

The status of the Migrate DB Pro release, including details of the new import feature.

The importance of not working in a vacuum.

The features of Restrict Content Pro 2.9.

Links and Resources:

Commissions

Easy Digital Downloads Development

How to Create Your Own SSL Certificate Authority

Pippin’s Plugins

Mergebot

Laraval Spark

Serializededitor.com

EDD 2.8

Migrate DB Pro

Restrict Content Pro 2.9

If you’re enjoying the show we sure would appreciate a Review in iTunes. Thanks!

Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Apply Filters, the podcast all about WordPress development. Now here’s your hosts, Pippin Williamson and Brad Touesnard.

BRAD: Welcome to Episode 82. This time Pippin and I will be talking about what we’ve been up to in the past couple months, some things that worked out for us, some things that we struggled with. Pippin, what have you been up to, man?

PIPPIN: Well, it’s been, I think, almost a month and a half to two months since our last episode when we interviewed Matt Mullenweg, so quite a bit has actually happened in that month to month and a half. I kind of forget how fast things move until you look back and think, that wasn’t very long ago, and then you look at all the different things that happened in that time.

We’ve had three major updates that we pushed out in the last couple of days. Actually, all of this week, I think. Two of them went live yesterday and one the day before that were all the culmination of anywhere from one to six months of work.

All right, let me give you a quick back story. Five years ago, we started Easy Digital Downloads. And, like a lot of people in the WordPress world, we were very excited about what custom post types allowed us to do. There was this general philosophy that proliferated the WordPress development world that you should use custom post types for anything and everything, and so we used custom post types and post meta to store transactional data for Easy Digital Downloads: payment records, logs, et cetera. Well, that was five years ago.

As a lot of people who have used a WordPress e-commerce plugin, whether you’re talking EDD or WooCommerce or any of the others that also use custom post types or any similar scenario, we’ve discovered that there are significant problems and side effects posed by putting that data in that database. It basically comes down to you’re storing a whole lot of data in a super inefficient manner in a way that it was never designed to be used for. You’re putting a square into a round hole is what you’re trying to do, basically.

The reason we did it, the same reason everybody else did it, is that it was super, super easy to do. There was almost zero learning curve to do it, and we could do it. Anyway, that was five years ago.

We’ve had serious — there’s been a lot of serious problems caused by it, especially with performance and scaling. Well, for the last two years, we’ve been planning how to get that data out, how to move it into custom database tables that are precisely designed for the schema that we need, precisely designed for the purpose that the data has, what it is, where it needs to be stored, what we need to store, how we need to store it, what kind of relationships we need, et cetera. We’ve been working on slowly planning this out for two years, and yes