Common practice in the software industry is to offer a perpetual product with an included upgrade period. This period is usually 6 months to 1 year. After the initial period expires customers have the option to (but are not required to) renew their upgrade package. Without the renewal the customer can no longer download the latest release. In this post I’ll show you how to configure PHPAudit to enforce upgrade periods.

This post assumes you have a working PHPAudit installation, order system and at least one product configured.

1. Start by logging into the PHPAudit admin area, follow this path:

2. Next, we need to create a package for the initial upgrade period:

3. Now we need to create the renewal package:

4. Finally, add the upgrade packages from step #2 and #3 to the product:

4a. As an alternative to step #4 above, you can also add the upgrade packages at the pricing level. This powerful feature allows you to assign custom upgrade packages within different pricing tiers for a single product. Here’s how:

Customers will now have the initial upgrade term included automatically with each new order! When it comes time for renewal, the customer will need to complete the following steps:

This “how to” article covers a question we are often asked. If you have a suggestion for a new article let us know. Enjoy the article and feel free to add comments

As mentioned in our newsletter earlier this month the price of PHPAudit will be increasing from 1st June 2008.

This is part of our effort to standardise pricing across both PHPAudit and Iono, following our acquisition of the latter late last year. Changes were made to Iono previously in January and so these tweaks will bring PHPAudit into line with the pricing model going forward. This near-parity of pricing between PHPAudit and Iono allows our customers to choose the most suitable product based on features rather than price.

From 1^st June 2008, PHPAudit pricing will be as follows:
PHPAudit 250: $99.99 inc. 12 months of support & updates ($75 renewal fee for a further year)
PHPAudit 1000: $225 inc. 12 months of support & updates ($100 renewal fee for a further year)
PHPAudit 2500: $350 inc. 12 months of support & updates ($150 renewal fee for a further year)

The renewal pricing for our PHPAudit Unlimited customers will follow that of PHPAudit 2500, and so increases to $150 per year.

Complete parity of pricing is expected to be achieved towards the end of the year, following the necessary technical changes to both PHPAudit and Iono to support this.

Existing customers nearing the limit of their current license should consider upgrading prior to 1st June to beat the price rise. Equally existing PHPAudit Lite users and prospective customers may wish to purchase either a PHPAudit 1000 or PHPAudit 2500 license to future-proof themselves and avoid the price increase.

I was browsing through 2003 backups the other day when I ran across the very first version of PHPAudit. This version was never released to the general public. We used it internally for contract projects from 2002 until the official PHPAudit v1.0 release on August 6th, 2003.

Compared to the PHPAudit of today it’s quite lacking, but does give a good picture of how development has progressed through the years. I’ve made a few screenshots that show pretty much all there was to it back then.

The Dashboard

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Product Integration Code