Two weeks ago I sent out an email to our customers letting them know that we were working on some major upgrades to our flagship products, Social Warfare and Social Warfare – Pro. When I sent that email, our team had every intention to ensure minimal downtime for our website (just a few hours) and quick turnaround for an update to version 2.3.0.
Well, sometimes things just don’t go as planned.
Especially when you’re trying to do something that most industry experts said was “impossible”.
We have been working for months on making a giant leap with our backend ecommerce platform, switching from WooCommerce to Easy Digital Downloads. For those who know, these are two completely different commerce solutions, each with their own strengths.
After nearly 3 years working with WooCommerce, we realized that there were many things that were holding us back from making some great advancements for all our users. Moving to Easy Digital Downloads would unlock a lot of doors for us.
Even though many WordPress developers (even other WordPress plugin business owners) told us that the move from Woo to EDD would be impossible, we knew we had to try it. The reward for succeeding was too great, and the risk was only the lost time and resources that we would dedicate to it.
After spending weeks on it, things looked bleak. The complexity of the transition was absolutely daunting. We couldn’t even find any high level WordPress developers that would allow us to pay them to help.
But our lead developer, Nick, just kept pushing through. He eventually figured out a way to address all the complications of modifying the core code base to a new system, and migrating all of our customers over.
After months of work, we finally planned the switch, and began executing the migration.
And we succeeded.
Now, it didn’t go perfectly. In fact, quite the opposite—things straight up melted down for a little while.
Instead of having to take the website offline for a few hours, it ended up being down for 6hrs on Thursday, and then another 9hrs on Friday.
Then, when we finally thought we accomplished the impossible, our servers started crashing due to what can only be described as a DDoS-like attack. With our new plugin version (2.3.0) deployed, people started updating. And when they went to re-register the plugin for the updated system (according to our new license registration instructions) they were unable to get access to their account pages.
So we fought hard for what seemed like an eternity of days (4 in total until the server was 100% stable), trying to stop the server from crashing, and give support to those users who were encountering trouble because of it.
Long story short, we did it. We survived.
We may have picked up some bumps and bruises along the way, but we accomplished what others said was impossible. And it’s going to allow us to do a lot more for our users, and all our future users because of it.
If you are a Social Warfare – Pro user, and you haven’t yet updated to version 2.3.2 (current version) please do so. Just follow the registration instructions I linked above, and you’ll be all set on the new system.
If you encounter any issues whatsoever, our support staff is ready to dive in and figure out how to fix it. Just be sure to fill out the support form on your account page.
Now that this upgrade is complete, we’ll be working on releasing some new products (add-ons) and unveiling a completely new website design in the coming weeks. We’ll be focusing heavily on ease-of-use for the website, and releasing some new add-ons that enable features our users have been asking about for a long time.
We’re super excited about it!
Thank you to all of you who were patient with us and helped us navigate some of the bugs and glitches along the way. We appreciate you, and can’t wait to show you what we’re working on next!
Hi,
Glad you guys got it figured out! Care to share any of the potentially auxiliary features.
Love your plug in but my Pinterest share button hasnt worked consistently since the update. Can I roll back?
Have you reached out to our support team, Charlotte?
Switching from Woo to EDD – You deserve a standing ovation, Nick!
I have been using EDD for selling digital products and have built several sites using Woo.
Migration of data from Woo to EDD that’s an incredible job. Maybe, you can write a detailed post about your learnings, and I am sure it will be helpful to a lot of other devs. Also, it will be an interesting read. 🙂
I think Nick is actually planning a detailed article about how he did it.
Congratulations!
I love your plugin. I’m using a free version of Warfare but now I’m planning to buy this plugin. I’m facing some problem in free version now.
I’m sure, I will not face any problem in the premium version. And I would like to thanks providing us this awesome plugin.
– Rajinder
Congrats. It’s a great story and shows how we ALL can do the impossible with a lot of elbow grease and overcoming our fears of failure. Love it!
Congrats Dustin,
I love your plugin, I plan to do a review on it in a few weeks time.
However, I’m scared to update my plugin.
I hope I don’t lose my shares?
Awesome Empowee! You shares should be completely safe in the network databases. We have a support article that gives the details if that helps.
My site was one that was affected by the blank admin page issue. It took two hours to figure out what went wrong, since I hadn’t updated any plugins that day. I blamed my server (because honestly, 95% of the time, it’s their fault, lol). They helped me figure out how to disable all of my plugins at once through FTP, then reactivate them one by one until I found the source.
I did end up asking for a refund (which you processed quickly, thank you) for SW and deleted it from my site, but I’m keeping an eye on conversations to see if this issue is completely resolved (and stays resolved) because I really miss SW. There’s just no other plugin like it.
Congrats on getting everything switched over! It sounds like it was a monumental task. I hope to return as a user once I get over my shell shock of seeing a big blank admin page. 😀
Hi Nicole! We certainly appreciate your patience and understanding. All reports coming in are saying the problem has been resolved.
Woohoo! Congrats Dustin and Nick.
I’m really happy that you guys were able to accomplish the impossible. I was rooting for you.
About the Buffer thing – I have had a note on my to-do list for weeks about contacting Buffer to ask what it takes to make sure the Twitter handle is included on shares. Dustin, you explained it so wonderfully and now I get it.
Most of the time, I use ViralTag (versus Buffer) for Twitter sharing and they have the same issue of not adding the Twitter handle. Perhaps they are using the same logic as Buffer. Maybe I will get in touch with those guys and point them to this thread. Even though Buffer is more popular I have a good relationship with the ViralTag team and they have a bunch of integrations that I use (like Rebrandly for example).
Thanks for all you do.
Cheers!
And thank YOU Ileane for all your support! You’re the best!
Dustin, out of interest, what sort of things are you going to be able to do with EDD that you couldn’t with WooCommerce?
The biggest thing is that EDD is specifically designed for selling, licensing and managing software products while WooCommerce, right out of the box is more suited towards selling and shipping physical merchandise. So now that we have a better system for licensing, we can start rolling out addons to the plugin. Also, this one has a much better affiliate addon with lots of great reports and resources.
Yea, Nick said it. Mostly the ease of integrating the licensing (our old system had issues) and allowing us to create a marketplace of add-ons.
First: AWESOME
Well done, and kudos to the team who made that happen.
Second: YOU JUST FREAKED ME OUT A LITTLE
I’m about to attempt the same thing but haven’t fully looked down the rabbit hole.
Anyone I can touch base with there to ask for a heads up on specific items I might need to be aware of?
Thanks for a great product. Love you guys.
Wow. That’s a loaded question. It took me weeks of deep diving before I got everything into place. If you want to chat sometime when you’re working on it, just let me know what chat/IM tool you use and we can get in touch. 🙂
Yea, definitely talk to Nick. He’s the mastermind behind making the transition from Woo to EDD happen.
Glad you guys got it figured out! Care to share any of the potentially new features.
There’s quite a few, but I’ll provide just one that some of us feel is probably the largest. This new system makes managing license keys 1,000% easier with the registration API and whatnot. What this means is that we are now able to begin shipping addons for the plugin. I’m actually working on the first one right now. When we roll out the new site design in a couple of weeks we hope to have a handful of addons ready to roll out with it.
The add-ons we’re looking to release relatively soon are:
1. Social Follow Widgets
2. Shorcode Expansion pack
We’ve got probably close to a dozen ideas on our wishlist board. 😀
Congratulations Dustin! We upgraded successfully and we are waiting for your new addons.
Awesome Faraz! Great to hear. They should come relatively fast!
I’ve only encountered a problem once.. when I first signed up LOL!!! the updates have gone smoothly, even in the last few weeks. Keep up the great work!
So great to hear Gisele! Thank you for your support!
Love your transparency about the downtime and glad for the new features coming! I love Social Warfare and can’t wait to see new things. Thanks for all your time and efforts to make it a better plugin.
Thank you for your support Harriet! It’s our honor to be able to wake up and do this every day.
I’ve run into an issue on several sites that were still running 2.3.1. At some seemingly random moment, the admin area would trigger a fatal error. It isn’t a typical “white screen of death,” though, since it generates a fully-formed HTML error page, with an empty white box in the middle of it. Once that happens, the plugin needs to be deactivated (or updated to 2.3.2) via FTP in order to regain access to the dashboard.
It appears to be fixed in 2.3.2… So if anyone out there is still running 2.3.1, UPDATE IMMEDIATELY so this doesn’t happen to you!
Oh, and congrats on doing this impossible. I can’t even begin to imagine how difficult it would be to migrate thousands of active subscriptions from WooComm to EDD! Bravo. 🙂
It was incredibly difficult figuring out how to get lined up. I’ll be honest, EDD has really terrific documentation, but with what we were trying to accomplish, I had to open up their plugin and go through parts of it line by line in order to figure out how everything functioned in the backend. I’ll give you an example with Stripe Payments. On WooCommerce, they maintain the subscription information and when the renewal is due, they ping Stripe and ask stripe to create a new payment. On the EDD side, they create a subscription inside of Stripe’s database, then when it renews, Stripe pings our server to let EDD know that it renewed. So not only was I migrating all this stuff into EDD, but I had to migrate all the Stripe payments into Stripe’s database with everything lined up right so that EDD would know how to process those pings. That part alone took me like 3 days of research. Fortunately stripe has an active IRC channel and they have devs in there who are incredibly helpful. When I got it working, I was really excited and let them know and they sent me a coupon for a free Stripe t-shirt.
Yea, it was a bit scary to think about the ramifications if we didn’t do something right. We’re all super happy with how the migration went overall.
Yup, we encountered that on a small handful of sites on 2.3.1 and pushed out 2.3.2 specifically just to get that fixed right up.
Great job, guys! Congrats. Seems like a mega project. I can imagine the stress of finally taking it life and then fighting the issues on the fly. You must have had some sleepless nights…
Keep up the good work (after you had some well deserved rest :))
I definitely had some extended stressful days. But it was worth it.
Thanks a lot guys for your amazing support (super quick to solve issues my site encountered in between updates) and glad you were able to do it 🙂 nothing is impossible!
Thanks, Sofia, for the awesome support and encouragement!
Thank you very much Sofia!
I’ll be honest…
I was irritated with the whole downtime thing.
But I thought about it. And then I looked around me. Everything was still intact. The world wasn’t falling apart. I wasn’t disintegrating.
Everything seemed fine. 🙂
Well done on the move, and I hope it brings many blessings.
Yeah, it was really stressful and I totally sympathize with your frustrations that you experiences, but we all just dug in and did our best to get things solved as quickly as we could. 🙂
Dustin – one improvement that you could make that would be awesome is to be able to add your Twitter handle when sharing through Buffer. This is one feature that other sharing tools have that you don’t. I have mentioned this to your techs a couple of times and they said absolutely! The time frame given was at your next update but it hasn’t gotten done.
I totally get why that would be helpful Bill. The challenge is, we would then be inserting a Twitter handle when we don’t really know if the person clicking the Buffer button is actually going to share to Twitter. Since buffer now allows for sharing to Facebook (page, profile, or group), Google+ (page or profile), Pinterest, LinkedIn (page or profile), and Instagram, that means there are 10 potential channels that a Buffer user can share to.
Now, what would be great is if Buffer’s API had a way to tap into the Tailored Posts and apply a different message based on the network selected. I’d make sure we jumped all over that.