Category: Easy Digital Downloads

Over the years I’ve sure appreciated having Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) plugin to platform my plugin sales. It’s pretty cool, and handles most my needs including software licensing.

However, I have had numerous little issues with the plugin. I apply each update with trepidation, because often changes (“upgrades”) cause abrupt slumps in my sales. Of course the developers are well-meaning, and I’m sure these upgrades are in fact upgrades for certain people. But it’s becoming more and more clear that even though I’m a paying subscriber of EDD, their developers might not be “in touch” with the my reality or my customers’ realities.

There are things a customer just. does. not. want. to. see. when. shopping.

Case in Point

With the latest updates to the Stripe payment gateway plugin, EDD moved to the new API and allows small text to appear on screen just below the credit card fields, which easily would scare off a good number of customers:

“By providing your card information, you allow [Business Name] to charge your card for future payments in accordance with their terms.”

Oh dear God! How long has my website been telling people THAT? “Their terms?” What terms? Where does the customer now go to find those terms? Away from your checkout, that’s where.

Let’s Fix THAT

I know that EDD is stressing the subscription model and has a strong integration with Stripe for that model, but for those of us running EDD shops without subscription, this kind of small print is… not great. Luckily there’s an easy fix, but it does involve a few lines of PHP

add_filter( 'edds_stripe_payment_elements_terms', function( $terms ) {
    $terms['card'] = 'never';
    $terms['applePay'] = 'never';
    $terms['sofort'] = 'never';
    $terms['cashapp'] = 'never';
    $terms['bancontact'] = 'never';
    // view more methods here: https://stripe.com/docs/js/elements_object/create_payment_element#payment_element_create-options-terms 
	return $terms;
} );

Other payment methods might need to have these off-putting terms turned off too. You can view their keys here: https://stripe.com/docs/js/elements_object/create_payment_element#payment_element_create-options-terms

My Verdict

The card terms should be set to “never” by default, and set to the other ☠️☠️☠️ option when EDD store subscriptions are enabled. Developers should be serving the majority of their users, esp. their paying users. I can’t imagine that most EDD users are using the subscription model. It’s expensive, complex and controversial amongst merchants and customers.

After various other SNAFUs over the years, makes me very hesitant to apply site upgrades on anything but a development server. This is frustrating. I just don’t like the prospect of combing through upgrades to review UX each time. I’m paying them so it just doesn’t seem like it should be my job. </tirade>

Once a customer has purchased more than one download from your Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) e-commerce shop, and especially if they have renewed their purchases year-over-year, there will be a source of confusion for them in their account pages, if/when they go to fetch a download file.

The list of downloads will include duplicate links in table rows, and the customer might not know which link to click to get the latest file. In fact, all the links with the same title are the same download. But how are they to know that? Why should they have to suss all that out, when it should just be a quick grab-n-go?

I get asked about this repeatedly, so I decided to code in a fix. I initially thought I’d solve this problem using the ‘edd_before_download_history‘ action hook in the ‘easy-digital-downloads/templates/history-downloads‘ template file, but that action hook doesn’t include the $orders variable, and that’s a shame because I can’t conditionally show a message if the customer has more than one download, e.g.

if ( count( $orders ) > 1 ) {
    // Then show an awkward message, like:
    echo '
awkward message explaining how all the links below with the same title are actually to the same file.
';
}

I’d have to put my awkward message in the template if I wanted to be at least minimally awkward about my message (I mean, only showing it to customers with more than one order). Sigh.

And so I ended up uploading a template override after all, which I try to avoid because updating templates every time EDD updates the parent templates is a pain. That said, I’ve updated EDD and WooCommerce templates so many hundreds of times I could almost do it with my eyes closed. That doesn’t mean it’s fun. I wish EDD would include some $variables in more of its action hooks.

Here’s what I did. I added some logic such that the $orders variable contains orders by DATE, in descending (DESC) order. That way, when the orders are looped through in the template, as they already are, I can collect item product IDs in an array. If that item product ID is already shown, I won’t show it again:

First, add two lines after line 31, to add to the edd_get_order query args:

'type'           => 'sale',
'status__not_in' => array( 'trash', 'refunded', 'abandoned' ),
'order'          => 'DESC', // add this line
'orderby'        => 'date_created', // add this line, too!

Next, add one line after line 51, so it looks more like this:

$prod_ids = [];
foreach ( $orders as $order ) :

Finally, add 6 lines of code after line 53, so it looks like this:

foreach ( $order->get_items_with_bundles() as $key => $item ) :

    if ( in_array( $item->product_id, $prod_ids ) ) {
        continue; // download link is already shown
    }
    if ( $item->is_deliverable() ) {
        $prod_ids[] = $item->product_id;
    }

Makes it much easier for a customer to just get their download without guesswork, which is what EDD is all about, right?

If you’ve purchased the Easy Digital Downloads Software Licensing add-on (min price $99/yr) and you have your eyes on API server traffic, you might have noticed that if your site runs CRON jobs as frequently as every minute, you are potentially getting hit by thousands of HTTP requests every hour (depending of course on how many license keys you’ve issued to customers). This can lead to DB errors and worse. That’s just not cool for the price.

EDD provides some “free” example integration code to get users started. Great, but we really shouldn’t use any volunteered code without an audit. Here’s the code they’ve provided:

/**
 * Initialize the updater. Hooked into `init` to work with the
 * wp_version_check cron job, which allows auto-updates.
 */
function edd_sl_sample_plugin_updater() {

	// To support auto-updates, this needs to run during the wp_version_check cron job for privileged users.
	$doing_cron = defined( 'DOING_CRON' ) && DOING_CRON;
	if ( ! current_user_can( 'manage_options' ) && ! $doing_cron ) {
		return;
	}

	// retrieve our license key from the DB
	$license_key = trim( get_option( 'edd_sample_license_key' ) );

	// setup the updater
	$edd_updater = new EDD_SL_Plugin_Updater(
		EDD_SAMPLE_STORE_URL,
		__FILE__,
		array(
			'version' => '1.0',                    // current version number
			'license' => $license_key,             // license key (used get_option above to retrieve from DB)
			'item_id' => EDD_SAMPLE_ITEM_ID,       // ID of the product
			'author'  => 'Easy Digital Downloads', // author of this plugin
			'beta'    => false,
		)
	);

}
add_action( 'init', 'edd_sl_sample_plugin_updater' );

Lines 7-11 of this PHP code indicate that as long as a site administrator is logged into the site and loads any page, or every time a CRON job runs, fire the EDD_SL_Plugin_Updater() class, which runs calls to the server running the API. Some CRON jobs run every minute, plus there are all the other cron jobs. Some admin users can load A LOT OF PAGES every minute, too.

YOIKS!

I added some checks to their suggested code so that even though the function runs with every page load (on the ‘init’ hook), it only ends up running if:

• CRON is not running yet an administrator is viewing a plugin update screen
• CRON is running and WP auto updates are turned on for the plugin

If auto updates are turned on this could still mean a lot of requests, but this certainly cuts way down on pointless API calls. Transients could also certainly be set; some plugins rate limit that way.

Slightly Optimized Version:

/**
 * Initialize the updater. Hooked into `init` to work with the
 * wp_version_check cron job, which allows auto-updates.
 */
function edd_sl_sample_plugin_updater() {

    if ( wp_installing() ) {
        return;
    }

    $doing_cron = defined( 'DOING_CRON' ) && DOING_CRON;

    if ( $doing_cron ) {
        /** 
         * If running cron, only continue if plugin auto updates are on
         * (The 'wp_version_check' CRON job supports auto-updates)
         */ 
        if ( 'yes' !== get_option( 'my_plugin_auto_updates', 'yes' ) ) { // if your plugin doesn't have a setting for this you can probably fetch the setting using hooks
            return;
        } else {
            // Probably wise to get a transient right here to slow this down...
        }
    } else {
        // If not doing cron, only check for updates for admin users
        if ( ! current_user_can( 'manage_options' ) ) {
            return;
        }
        global $pagenow;
        // Cut back on requests by only continuing if on plugin updates page
        if ( isset( $pagenow ) && 'plugins.php' !== $pagenow && 'update-core.php' !== $pagenow ) {
            return;
        }
    }
    // retrieve our license key from the DB
    $license_key = trim( get_option( 'edd_sample_license_key' ) );

    // setup the updater
    $edd_updater = new EDD_SL_Plugin_Updater(
        EDD_SAMPLE_STORE_URL,
        __FILE__,
        array(
            'version' => '1.0',                    // current version number
            'license' => $license_key,             // license key (used get_option above to retrieve from DB)
            'item_id' => EDD_SAMPLE_ITEM_ID,       // ID of the product
            'author'  => 'Easy Digital Downloads', // author of this plugin
            'beta'    => false,
        )
    );

}
add_action( 'init', 'edd_sl_sample_plugin_updater' );

Get in touch if you need help with this or you have better ideas!