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?

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.

Andy, how would you improve my software?

I couldn’t give an application specific answer because I didn’t have enough experience with the customers software. However, I did have an answer and I want to share it with you today. It’s how we’ve managed to grow our software from nothing more than an idea to a full time business.

Here’s the short answer:

Listen to your customers. Release early and release often, remain agile.

Let’s face it, good or bad, all customer feedback is very important. The good feedback makes it all worthwhile, while the bad feedback can be tough to swallow at times. How you handle the feedback will define your business.

Here are 3 simple tips to improving your software based on customer feedback.

1. Remain true to the software.

Listening to your customers does not mean you have to code everything they ask for. Some requests would take your application off track or be too specific to distribute in production. It’s ok to tell the customer we can’t or won’t implement this feature for our production distribution. Be sure to explain why the feature can’t be implemented and offer paths, such as custom development, to get it implemented.

2. Learn to spot trends in feedback.

It’s not always easy to spot trends in the feedback you receive. For example, most of our feedback comes through our support desk. If I get several tickets regarding a certain feature I take the time to revisit that feature. I try to find ways to streamline it by comparing the tickets to see if they have anything in common. This will usually result in identifying small changes that improve the feature overall.

3. Release early and release often, remain agile.

Constantly develop your software and release the changes every 4 to 6 weeks. Use customer feedback to further develop and improve the software. Developing too much in advance might result in features your customers may not want or need.

What advice would you give?

Media Sets

SPBAS enables you to add multiple (sub)categories so you can organize your media. Media is simply another name for the downloads that you offer to your customers. A media set is nothing more than a group of (sub)categories and media.

Media sets are added to products as assets. When a product is ordered the media set is issued giving the customer download access to all media in the set. Customers must login to access downloads.

Download Controls

A download control is assigned to a product as an asset which is issued automatically on purchase or manually after purchase, your choice. The only purpose of a download control is to limit access to downloads in media sets. Download controls can be set to expire in minutes, hours, days, months or years from the time of being issued. Once expired, depending on your settings, a download control will disable access to downloads or limit access to downloads. With limited access, no files added after the download control expires are accessible.

If no download controls are assigned to a product the customer will enjoy unlimited access to downloads.

Renewal Products

It’s standard practice in the software business to offer customers an initial upgrade & support period with the purchase of a perpetual (owned) license. The initial upgrade & support period usually expires in six months or one year. After the initial period expires, access to downloads & support is up for renewal. Six month renewals are generally priced at 20% of the perpetual cost with one year renewals at 40%. Renewals are important because they pay for ongoing development and continued support of the product. This is especially true for niche products with small overall markets.

To create a renewal product go to Admin -> Products -> Add New and choose the status of “Renewal”.

Renewal products have many of the same features as standard products, with a few exceptions:

1. Renewal products are assigned to other standard products.
2. Renewal products can only be ordered through the customer area “My Packages” section.
3. The option to order a renewal product only shows up if the standard product had a download control assigned.
4. If the download control is active then the option to purchase the Renewal product does not show up. It only shows up after the download control has expired.

Putting It All Together

Use the Getting Started module in the admin area of your SPBAS installation to begin (Admin -> Home -> Getting Started). This guide will walk you through each step of getting started with SPBAS which includes the setup of products, renewal products, media sets and download controls.

For this post we’ll use the customer area as an example. However, this technique applies to the other packages as well (admin, order, kb, etc). Let’s get started!

1. Open the following file in your text editor:

templates/default/css/style.css

2. Make style.css look like this:

@import url(”reset.css”);
@import url(”layout.css”);
@import url(”custom.css”);

3. Create the following file and open it in your text editor:

templates/default/css/custom.css

The CSS imports are parsed from top to bottom so anything you add to custom.css will take precedence over anything imported above it. Furthermore, custom.css is not a file that we distribute so it will never be overwritten during upgrades.

You can safely override distribution class names or add custom CSS to custom.css with full confidence it’s never going to be overwritten.

Please note, the only consideration is that if you overwrite style.css (from step 1 above) when upgrading, you’ll need to complete step 2 again to import your custom.css file.

Do you have design integration tips or tricks? Please share them in the comments below

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

Add Product & Licensing

Show All Products

Add/Edit Product Licenses

License Statistics

Product Integration Code

For most of our customers, it will come as a surprise that until 2007, a large amount of our time and revenue came from large contracts rather than our own products. In early 2007, that all changed and lead to a very interesting year.

Some of the highlights:

1. Andy’s new baby girl!
2. Finally getting to serve some of our customers who’ve been begging us to take on their custom development for months/years
3. Acquiring Iono
4. Finishing the m3 Framework
5. Starting work on the new SolidPHP website

Yes, it’s been a very interesting year and probably shaped SolidPHP more than the previous years all put together.

My two highlights, mainly because of my involvement with them, has been the acquisition of Iono and the new website. For many of our customers, it would probably be a dream come true to be able to acquire your main competitor. Late in 2007, this became a reality for us. In a way, it’s affected us far more than we could imagine. Being able to examine another business that mirrors your own on the outside but inside is a completely different beast is hugely revealing and rewarding. It forced us to re-examine certain parts of our own existing business (for the better I think) and probably one of the biggest changes customers will be able to see is documentation right from the start in m3. Rather curiously, one of the most memorable things about it was probably the day before it was announced, a prospective PHPAudit buyer saying “Fine, I’ll go to Iono” because we refused them a discount. Suffice to say, they didn’t get a discount on Iono either (but are now a very happy PHPAudit customer!).

The new SolidPHP website is also a huge favourite of mine. While we used to have a SolidPHP site, this was removed quite some time ago as it was outdated and didn’t seem to portray the business the way we wanted it to. We started work on the new site in 2007, and over the last few months, have tweaked and added to it. While it’s not quite finished and will be undergoing some minor changes in the next few weeks, we hope you agree that it’s far better than what we had before! If you have any comments on it, myself and Andy would really like to hear so please get in touch.

Despite everything, we came out of 2007 healthier than ever. As we now move close to the first stable release of a product built on m3, it’s amazing to think about everything that actually went into this. It’s easy to look at quantifiable things like time and money, but, in the bigger picture so much else goes in – immeasurable amounts of effort, the emotional ups and downs, the love and affection for developing great products. So much more goes into a product than can be measured, and I hope that this will show as you take a look at m3|KB and beyond.

2008 is going to be a big year for SolidPHP. I hope you will join us on this journey.