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.