WP-Members Beta Release Candidate 2 was pushed out to wordpress.org this morning. I have high expectations that this will be the final package and expect it to be pushed out to production soon.
Please let me remind everyone that this is a tricky upgrade. It is huge on the back end of the code for the plugin, but as far as features go, it shouldn’t look any different than what you’re running now.
For the vast majority of installs, this should go smoothly. But there are undoubtedly people who have some customizations that will need to be updated.
I am trying my best to make sure that anything deprecated (essentially obsolete) is done in a smooth manner so you have time to become aware and fix it before it is fully removed from the plugin. If you have any customizations of the plugin (i.e. custom code in your functions.php or elsewhere), it would be a good idea to review that against the list of deprecated functions and filters in the readme file.
With that in mind, 3.3.0 also removes some out-of-date functions that were deprecated long ago. Most of these were deprecated in 3.1.9 or earlier, so one major release cycle ago (about 2 years or older).
There is also a big change in the file system. WP-Members has been moving towards a more robust and standardized API structure. But older installs who have customizations from before that may have some included files in the custom code. It is quite likely that those include statements will need to be taken out since many of those files will have been moved, renamed, or removed over time. It has been a long time since a custom code snippet for the plugin has been published that required a included file from the plugin, but I know there is older code out there so this is a good time to review it.
You may be reading the above with dread, but let me assure you, there is good reason behind all of this, and the really good stuff about the 3.3.0 version is that it is more robust, more customizable, and just a whole lot cooler than ever! There are loads of new API functions and filter/action hooks. The code has had a major “going over” and I’m constantly working on making it more efficient.
I hope you like the new version. It’s just to start of new and better things that are coming in 2020!
Other posts for details on WP-Members 3.3.0