Easy Digital Downloads 2.5 Review

Easy Digital Downloads version 2.5 will be released tomorrow, so we’ve got an overview of new features and changes for you. Since version 2.4 was released in July, some handy new admin tools have been added along with much easier-to-navigate settings pages and some helpful changes for developers.

If you want to get a more detailed look into what’s changed, I’d recommend checking out the beta release announcements:

• beta 1 announcement
• beta 2 announcement

Previously, if you wanted to export a list of your downloads / products, you needed to install the free CSV Manager plugin. However, this could timeout while exporting products, and could be unreliable. As a result, a brand new CSV exporter has been added to the core plugin.

You can access the new product exporter by going to Reports > Export and scrolling down to the “Export Download Products in a CSV” box, which is new as of this version:

This exporter uses the EDD batch processing API, making it much better for stores with large numbers of products.

A recounting tool has also been introduced, which lets you recalculate statistics or earnings for your store. As these can sometimes be affected by caching, bugs, or other edge cases, this tool (under Tools > General) lets you recalculate these totals.

You can use this tool to:

• Recount Store Earnings and Sales
• Recount Earnings and Sales for a download
• Recount Earnings and Sales for All downloads
• Recount Customer Stats
• Reset Store

You can also recalculate customer stats while viewing the customer screen, as this tool has been added in a new tab there as well:

My favorite change in this version is the re-organization of the settings pages. Sometimes it could be hard to find the setting you wanted, as you needed to do a lot of scrolling under each tab (especially if you had several plugins activated).

Now settings are organized in “sections” within tabs, letting you see only groups of settings at a time and making it easier to navigate to the setting you want. For example, here’s what the “Payments” tab looks like with settings broken up into sections.

You’ll notice the “Authorize.net” tab above, which is from the Authorize.net extension. Extensions can add their settings in a dedicated section, making it easy to see settings related only to that extension.

Adding download files to your products has always been very flexible — you can add a file for a download, for all price levels of a download, or for a specific download. However, your download files were always displayed in the order you added them to customers.

This may not be the way you want to show download files, so you can now drag and drop them to change the display order of download files.

Developers will benefit from a couple changes to the way payments are structured and some REST API improvements.

First, the REST API has added an endpoint for file downloads so that you can query these externally. The API is also faster since its processing has been moved to the wp hook.

The EDD_Payment class has also been introduced to provide an easier way to interact with payment records:

This class has been built to provide a simple, intuitive way to interact with EDD payment records. It is similar to the EDD_Download and EDD_Customer classes we have introduced in other recent releases.
– Beta 1 announcement

The EDD_Payment class is backwards compatible so that all original payment update methods will continue to work, but it’s much easier to work with going forward. The team has an overview on the development blog with examples on instantiating the new payment class and using its methods to create or modify payment records.

There are also some small “quality of life” improvements you may be interested in.

First, if you frequently give out discounts, you may want to know who has used them. Payments can now be searched by discount code by entering discount: code in the orders search like this: discount: 5off

If you allow product quantities to be changed, you couldn’t previously get that date in payments exports. Quantities are now included in the payment history export.

Easy Digital Downloads version 2.5 makes some nice incremental improvements to the core plugin to help admins manage site stats, settings, exports, and download files. Developers also get some help with a payments class that makes it much easier to interact with payment records programmatically, and they can also leverage the more organized settings pages for extensions to make it clearer where extension settings are.

While there are no ground-breaking changes from the user perspective in this release, EDD 2.5 is geared towards giving both site administrators and developers some new tools to make their day-to-day management quicker and easier, improving the overall experience with EDD.

---