This will be a popular release! How do I know? We’ve finally delivered on two of our most highly requested features. Those two features are mass mail and suspension logic for unpaid invoices. In total, SPBAS v1.6 offers 5 new features with 12 improvements of existing features and 24 bug fixes.
  

Mass Mail Overview

Our goal with SPBAS is to make every module as complete as possible. We understand that the best things in life are often the hardest to come by. So while we could have implemented a half baked mass mail solution just to say we have the feature, we didn’t. Instead, we researched the market and consulted with serious e-mail marketers to create a very solid mass mail application. We hope you will agree.
  

Mass Mail Lists

Lists enable you to create groups of customers that meet specific criteria that you define. For example, say you have a release notice or policy change and you need to contact all customers. You’d create a list for that.

Lists are essentially a set of rules that you assign to a campaign. Each time you send a campaign the mailing list is generated based on the predefined rules. Approaching it this way results in a list that is dynamic and always automatically up to date.
  

Mass Mail Campaigns

For each mass mail campaign you can edit the e-mail copy, view it online or send it to yourself for testing. We provide several built in replaceable tags that you can use like {first name}, {last name}, etc.

We also support the inclusion of an Alt Body to accompany your HTML e-mail copy. The Alt Body is designed to be the plain text version of the HTML e-mail. Not everyone can receive HTML e-mails so it’s important to send a plain text copy along too so your message isn’t lost in a tangle of HTML markup.
  

After you’ve created your e-mail copy, you need to assign the campaign to one or more lists using the Assign Lists tab. Don’t worry, we’ve got duplicates covered. Even if a customer matches the criteria to be assigned to both lists, they’ll only receive one copy of your campaign.
  

Finally, we are ready to send the campaign using the Send Mail tab. This is where it gets really interesting. You have the following options to choose from:

- Max to send per hour
- Who to send to? every customer in the list or only customers who have never received the campaign before.
- When to send? Now, Per Schedule (date & time), Periodic Schedule (interval in days & time)
  

Imagine what you can do with that! Here at SPBAS, we’ll use the Periodic Schedule feature to e-mail our free version customers a few days after signup to make sure everything is going ok. Just to see if we can help with anything or if there are questions. It will help us stay in touch with you guys and hopefully make us better at what we do.

How will you use the mass mail features? Let me know in the comments.
  

Suspension Logic

Have a look at SPBAS Admin -> Settings -> Billing & Invoice. I’d like to touch on two new features today.

The first is invoice reminders which you can set to automatically send at your desired interval. For example, if I entered 30,60,90 the customer would get a reminder on the 30th day, the 60th day and finally the 90th day. The 90th day would be the final notice. The e-mail template used for these notices can be found at Admin -> Settings -> Templates -> Invoice, Invoice Reminder.

The second new feature is the ability to suspend the package for unpaid invoices after x days have passed. You could set this to be in sync with the invoice reminders. For example, using the 30,60,90 interval again, you could set the packages to suspend on the 97th day, 7 days after the final invoice reminder. How you configure it is up to you, tailor it to fit your exact business needs.
  

In Closing…

With this release SPBAS has become more stable and feature rich. We hope you enjoy the software.

We are pleased to announce that SPBAS v1.5 has been released. It’s available for download now from the customer area. This release focuses almost entirely on usability in the admin area. We’ve gone through and separated the “day to day” tasks from the “set it and forget it” tasks. The end result is a new admin user interface & design that should prove very easy to use and understand. We hope you will agree and look forward to your feedback in the comments.
  

Before we begin…

We would like to thank our sponsors for this release. Their contributions will benefit the entire community so please take a moment to show your support.
  

One size does not fit all

SPBAS is unique in the fact that it was designed to have multiple storefronts that all work from a single admin installation. Each storefront offers a fully branded e-commerce engine.

Before v1.5 we presented the storefronts in our standard data grid which was designed to display hundreds of records at once. We took a different approach with v1.5 based on the fact that most of you guys don’t utilize hundreds of storefronts. Now when you go to edit a storefront you are put directly into the edit view with the option to change to another storefront from a select box.

The select box approach wouldn’t work for other sections of SPBAS like customers, orders or invoices because you have the potential for many thousands of records. For things like storefronts, you’ll only ever have a few so it makes sense to use the select box to switch between them.

Combine & Consolidate

With v1.5 we’ve taken extra effort to combine & consolidate work flow throughout SPBAS. A great example of this, before v1.5 when manually adding a new customer you had to add the customer, add the user and then add the user to the customer. This amounted to dozens of clicks and much confusion.

Now with v1.5 when you need to manually add a new customer you can do so with a single form.

So where do I find X e-mail template again?

This really falls under combine & consolidate, but it was a big support issue prior to v1.5 so we thought we would touch on it. With v1.5 we’ve put all the e-mail templates in one spot so you can quickly find the template you need. The templates are organized into groups.

For example, if you are looking for a licensing e-mail template you would look in the license group.
  

Customer View Changes

There were many small changes to the customer view for v1.5. The biggest change was that we’ve added a customer summary tab which gives you an overview of the customer at a glance.
  

In closing…

Existing customers, go get it! Upgrade as soon as you can. We’ve only listed a few of the improvements here today, the rest you’ll have to see for yourself.

Everyone else, if you’ve tried SPBAS in the past then we encourage you to try it again now.

Thank you for your continued support. We look forward to your feedback and comments.

So what’s next? With the v1.5 release we will focus on usability in the admin area. Production is well underway already so I thought I would tell you a little more to expand on the video.

Layout & Design

We’ve had a lot of feedback concerning the color scheme used in the admin area. The one common issue reported by various people is that the colors are sometimes too faint or too similar. This reduces readability on some LCD screens.

Another issue addressed with the upcoming release is the separation of “day to day” tasks from the “set it and forget it” tasks in the admin area. To pull this one off we had to rethink our menu structure and navigation. These changes have resulted in a less cluttered admin area user interface which is easier to navigate and gives us more room to grow.

Here’s an early sneak peak at the new layout & design:

Simplicity – Less is More

Choices, choices, choices. SPBAS has a lot to offer, a ton of features which has resulted in a ton of configurable options. With the upcoming v1.5 release we’ve taken a step back, we are in the process of going through each & every screen and asking – what can we take away here without losing functionality? The results so far are simply amazing.

To give you an example of this, take a look at the screenshot below. It’s the new UI for the menu editor (a tool really only SPBAS developers will ever use, but a good example none the less). Notice that it requires only one (1) tab now whereas in v1.4 (the current version) the menu editor required five (5) tabs with a big learning curve.

* btw, ignore the alien profile pic. Profile pics were added for v1.5

Also note the inline documentation in the screenshot above. Documentation has been a major issue for some of you so far – or should I say the LACK of documentation? We feel that the usability changes for v1.5 will greatly reduce the learning curve and the need for exhaustive documentation.

So when will v1.5 be available?

Sometime in March if all goes well. We won’t rush it and at the same time won’t hold it back either. This is true for every release. Only when it’s ready will we release it.

So in closing, I just wanted to keep you guys posted on what we are working on. Something I hope to do on a regular basis. What do you think about the changes for v1.5 so far?

SPBAS v1.4 is our first release of the new year. It includes 24 bug fixes, 16 improvements and 15 new features. The majority of the changes for this release came directly from customer feedback. Customers who use SPBAS day in and day out to automate their business. We’ve listened to the feedback and delivered solutions. SPBAS v1.4.0 is a quality release which we hope you will enjoy.

Also, please show your support and appreciation to the customers who have sponsored features for this release. The features they sponsored would not have made it into v1.4.0 otherwise.

Lets get started! Here’s a highlight of the new features v1.4.0 has to offer:
  
  
Customer Area License View

Per request from Henri at SnippetMaster and others, we’ve changed the customer area license view.

With v1.3.0 the license view was limited to only 5 rows per page with pagination at the bottom. Many of our customers issue hundreds of licenses to a single end user, only showing 5 rows per page made finding a specific license almost impossible.

To make it more user friendly we added an auto-complete search and tweaked the pagination at the bottom. The pagination now enables you to go to the first or last page, go to a specific page and choose how many rows to show per page.

Multi-Currency Selection

It is now possible to assign more than one price sheet to an order form which will then give the customer a choice of what currency to pay in. Customers can change the currency at any time during the order process with prices are updated on the fly.

Custom Pricing Per Customer

This is one of my personal favorites, it is now possible to assign a custom price sheet to a specific customer. This is a very powerful feature that can be used in a variety of ways. For example, this allows you to give resellers of your software immediate discounts, give a high volume customer an automatic 25% discount on anything ordered, or you could use price sheets to implement a price freeze for a long time customers. The applications are endless.
  
  

Pay Gateway Modules

Thanks to sponsors we now have support for Clickbank and a Wire Transfer payments.

As part of the wire transfer module we added the ability to assign each pay gateway one or more e-mail templates. The assigned e-mails are sent to the customer when the pay gateway is used for payment.

Finally, the 2Checkout and Moneybookers modules were rewritten for this release.
  
  

3rd Party Code Hooks

Per request from Mike at Simbunch, we’ve added two new code hooks. The hooks are triggered when a customer registers a new account from either the order form or the registration form in the customer area.

Mike was also kind enough to give me an in-depth overview of how code hooks are implemented in Joolma. I’ll definitely have this in mind as we expand our selection of available code hooks.
  
  

Legacy Features are Back!

We’ve added two very useful features to SPBAS that were available in legacy software, but not in SPBAS until now. Those two features are the global license log viewer and the ability to clone products.
  
  

Localization Import & Export

For our International customers, we have taken special effort to make sure every portion of SPBAS is fully localized. The result of this is over 3,000 translations for the EN-US language pack alone.

Up to v1.3.0 all translations were added and modified through a web UI. The web UI is a real time saver when editing entries or adding new entries during development. However, it proved to be extremely time consuming when trying to create new language packs.

You guys asked for a way to export localization to a flat file which could be quickly & easily translated using a text editor and then imported back into SPBAS. This functionality was added to SPBAS v1.4.0.
  
  
That’s it for now! Enjoy the software, I look forward to your comments and feedback.