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.
Leave a Reply