To celebrate our 10^th anniversary, we decided to give them.es a makeover. Our goal was to maintain a sense of familiarity while refining some elements, refreshing the color scheme and replacing the default font. We also reviewed web accessibility and fixed some contrast errors to improve readability.

Many technical features have been upgraded code-wise, with the aim of improving the user experience and ensuring compatibility with the upcoming WordPress v6.9 release. In addition, a cool and useful Product filter has been added to the front page.

We would love to hear your thoughts on the new, fresh look and feel. You can either leave your comments below or submit the feedback form anonymously.

We’re keeping a good pace and just released v1.9.0 of our free and v1.5.0 v1.5.1 of our premium billing and project management plugin for WordPress.

Finally a highly requested feature – the ability to send invoices and quotes as email attachments via a webform – has been implemented in the Pro version. Default values like email subject and email body can be defined globally. But it’s also possible to add a personal touch to the email and change the values individually per post.

As a consequence this makes sharelinks more or less obsolete and we decided to deprecate this feature without hard feelings. Password protected sharelinks lacked some important abilities (like downloading PDFs) and according to our knowledge and feedback from the community they were not used very often. In the end the email webforms are more convenient and even more secure because no passwords need to be sent to customers in cleartext anymore.

Existing links will continue to work for the time being but it will not be possible to create new sharelinks anymore.

Incorporating e-invoices is another important milestone in this release. Although PDF invoices are just fine if both contracting parties agreed on accepting them, the future belongs to transmitting documents in an electronic data interchange format. Heads up: E-invoices may even be required by law in your country sooner or later in a B2B or B2G context…

That’s why Billy invoices can now also be generated in the UBL XML format which is an open standard for electronic business documents. This feature is optional, needs to be explicitly enabled in the Customizer and has been marked as “beta”. Your help in testing the implementation is more than welcome.

Please be informed that an upgrade to at least WordPress v6.5 is mandatory if you want to use all new features as we developed with state-of-the-art technology like the Interactivity API to give you the look and feel you deserve. Falling back to an old approach was a no go. So if you’re still on an old WordPress version you can update the plugin but won’t be able to benefit from some of the cool new stuff.

Meanwhile WordPress is already in the 6.6 prerelease phase and since we thoroughly tested Billy with the current beta version, no compatibility issues are expected when WordPress 6.6 gets released in less than a month.

Billy – our Billing suite for WordPress – has received some useful updates in the latest release and even comes with new premium features in the Pro version.

Quote numbers can now be auto-incremented, similar to invoices. This is optional and the old default “Ymd” number format is still available. An useful addition to invoice and quote number prefixes are the placeholder variables {YEAR}, {MONTH} and {DAY} which means that you are now able to define number formats like INV-2024-05-13-12345678910 or similar.

A highly requested feature was having a fully customizable PDF footer layout. That’s why a reusable block pattern, similar to the PDF header, has been added in the block editor.

In addition, the PDF table output has been improved and inner borders are now enabled by default. Note that in the Pro version the PDF styles (of the table design and even more) can still be modified using custom CSS.

Speaking about the Billy Pro add-on. This release has received a major upgrade with two completely new enhancements and is available for all existing customers, having a lifetime license, with no additional costs. And best of all, the price for new users has not been raised.

After you update the plugin you’ll get cool project management features like checklists in Kanban-style boards and a simple time tracking tool.

By ensuring a smooth workflow and using a modular approach with full WordPress block editor compatibility, the editing experience should be an easy ride.

With the addition of two new Billy admin pages, the time had come to restructure and combine all pages in a single dashboard menu in order to keep the WordPress admin sidebar tidy.

An important advice as this can’t be said often enough: Your WordPress data will never leave your server and guarding against data corruption, breach or loss should be a matter of course. That’s even more important after Billy’s evolvement to a full project management suite.

First of all it’s vital to care about your site’s health and keep your system up-to-date. In addition a proper backup strategy should not be neglected – and in this case the WordPress ecosystem can provide lots of mature backup and restoration solutions that get the job done easily.

When was the last time you reviewed and improved this process?

Many thanks 👋 to the engaged community for the valuable feedback that initiated the work on some of these features und bug fixes. There are still some requests and ideas in the pipeline, so stay tuned for more!