This free plugin overrides the grouped product template during a subscription switch so that there is a nice button interface showing the prices and which one is current.

Plugin: Better Subscription Switching Buttons

A WordPress plugin that improves the subscription switching experience in WooCommerce Subscriptions by providing a cleaner, more intuitive interface for switching between subscription plans.

Description

Better Subscription Switching Buttons replaces the default WooCommerce Subscriptions switching interface with a simplified table view that shows clear “Switch” buttons for each available plan. The current plan is clearly marked, and users can switch between plans with a single click.

Currently only works with grouped products.

Installation

1. Upload the plugin files to the /wp-content/plugins/better-subscription-switching-buttons directory, or install the plugin through the WordPress plugins screen directly.
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ screen in WordPress
3. No configuration needed – the plugin will automatically override the grouped product template during a switch

Usage

1. Create a grouped product in WooCommerce
2. Add subscription products as child products
3. The plugin will automatically display the enhanced switching interface on the product page for logged-in users with active subscriptions

Synopsis

• You have a plugin that you host on GitHub (must be public, not private)
• You want new releases for that plugin to show up in wp-admin
• You want to be able to “enable auto-updates” for that plugin in wp-admin

How

Since WordPress 5.8, we’ve been able to set the Update URI in the plugin header. Setting that plugin URI allows us to add a filter to modify the update process based on the Update URI.

The Code

First, you need to add the Update URI to your plugin header, i.e.:

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Your Custom Plugin
Update URI: https://github.com/your-org/your-custom-plugin/
*/

Then, add a filter like this:

<?php
add_filter( 'update_plugins_github.com', 'self_update', 10, 4 );

/**
 * Check for updates to this plugin
 *
 * @param array  $update   Array of update data.
 * @param array  $plugin_data Array of plugin data.
 * @param string $plugin_file Path to plugin file.
 * @param string $locales    Locale code.
 *
 * @return array|bool Array of update data or false if no update available.
 */
function self_update( $update, array $plugin_data, string $plugin_file, $locales ) {

	// only check this plugin
	if ( 'your-custom-plugin/your-custom-plugin.php' !== $plugin_file ) {
		return $update;
	}

	// already completed update check elsewhere
	if ( ! empty( $update ) ) {
		return $update;
	}

	// let's go get the latest version number from GitHub
	$response = wp_remote_get(
		'https://api.github.com/repos/your-org/your-custom-plugin/releases/latest',
		array(
			'user-agent' => 'YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME',
		)
	);

	if ( is_wp_error( $response ) ) {
		return;
	} else {
		$output = json_decode( wp_remote_retrieve_body( $response ), true );
	}

	$new_version_number  = $output['tag_name'];
	$is_update_available = version_compare( $plugin_data['Version'], $new_version_number, '<' );

	if ( ! $is_update_available ) {
		return false;
	}

	$new_url     = $output['html_url'];
	$new_package = $output['assets'][0]['browser_download_url'];

	error_log('$plugin_data: ' . print_r( $plugin_data, true ));
	error_log('$new_version_number: ' . $new_version_number );
	error_log('$new_url: ' . $new_url );
	error_log('$new_package: ' . $new_package );

	return array(
		'slug'    => $plugin_data['TextDomain'],
		'version' => $new_version_number,
		'url'     => $new_url,
		'package' => $new_package,
	);
}

The Result

When WordPress checks if there are plugin updates available, the update now shows as being available. If you have auto-updates enabled, then the plugin will autoupdate.

Synopsis

I wrote another free mini-plugin. This one allows a WooCommerce store to pause all WooCommerce Subscription renewals.

Use Cases

There are times when a WooCommerce store needs to temporarily pause all renewals, such as:

• They need to catch up on a backlog of shipments before allowing more renewals to run
• Supply chain has slowed down manufacturing, and new inventory won’t be in stock for another week
• Fulfillment needs to be paused during a holiday

In these scenarios, it would be fairly safe to pause renewals temporarily, and unpause them after a certain period of time.

Details

• This stops actions with the `woocommerce_scheduled_subscription_payment` and `woocommerce_scheduled_subscription_payment_retry` hooks from being claimed by action scheduler, effectively pausing them.
• As soon as they are unpaused, any past-due actions will start to run.
• This does not pause any other actions.
• This doesn’t work for the old PayPal Standard subscriptions or the WC Pay subscriptions that aren’t associated with the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin; it only works with subscriptions managed by WooCommerce Subscriptions.

Download

https://github.com/NickGreen/pause-renewal-actions

Click the green ‘code’ button, and the ‘Download Zip’ link. You can then upload that zip file to your WordPress site. Go to Tools > Pause Renewal Actions and toggle the option there to pause renewals.

Disclaimer

This plugin is provided with no support or guarantees. Testing/development is done for this, but I’d still recommend doing a quick test on a development site before loading on production, to be sure there aren’t any issues with a specific site. If you have an issue or suggestion, please submit an issue or PR in the repository on GitHub. Thanks for being part of the WordPress community!

I wrote a mini-plugin. It extends the functionality of AutomateWoo with a custom action which allows you to add a free product to an order as a line item.

Intended use

This action is intended for downstream use, such as adding a product to the order after it is created, but before it gets shipped, and the customer doesn’t need to be aware of it while checking out.

This is because the product doesn’t get added to the order until after it has been created, so therefore doesn’t show on the checkout page or the order confirmation page. This means you can’t use it as a replacement for Force Sells, for example, which adds products to the cart before checkout.

I repeat: AutomateWoo runs asynchronously, so you will want to test that the product is added to your orders in a timely enough manner for your purposes.

Also, note that any product added will be added as a free product (price of $0), since it doesn’t make sense to add a cost to the order after it’s been paid for.

Repo

https://github.com/NickGreen/automatewoo-order-add-product

This snippet will add a new {product_category} placeholder to the email subject for the New Order email in WooCommerce.

So, for example, when I go to WooCommerce > settings > email > New Order > “manage”, I can have a subject line like this:
[{site_title}]: New order - [{product_category}] #{order_number}

Use Case

We ran an automated import from a Tumblr site to a new WordPress site, and all galleries were imported as gallery shortcodes in classic editor blocks, and they all were set to the default 3 columns and showing thumbnail sizes.

We wanted to change the gallery settings on those imported galleries to a single column, and full size.

Filterable Attributes

The gallery shortcode has a bunch of attributes that you can apply to it: https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/gallery_shortcode/#parameters

These are filterable using the shortcode_atts_gallery filter.

Code Example

Use Case

You are trying to export or track which subscriptions have been gifted.

Plugins

• WooCommerce Subscriptions
• Gifting for WooCommerce Subscriptions
• WooCommerce Subscriptions Importer and Exporter

Snippet

Output

This will add a new ‘Recipient’ column to your CSV Export, which will include the user ID of the recipient. After importing into Google Sheets or similar, you can sort by that colum to determine the subscriptions which have a recipient, i.e. which ones have been gifted.

There’s no default way to set a minimum subscription period with WooCommerce Subscriptions, but there are a couple of potential solutions to this:

Sign-up fee and free trial

Let’s say you want a customer to have to pay a minimum amount, and then go monthly after that, you could set a sign-up fee and free trial on the subscription to ensure that the customer pays a minimum amount before being able to cancel.

There’s a decent blog post about exactly how to do that here: https://wpbeaches.com/set-a-minimum-subscription-period-in-woocommerce-subscriptions/

Hide cancel button until minimum number of payments

Another way to do this is to simply take away the customers’ ability to cancel the subscription until a minimum number of payments have processed. Thanks to jrick1229 for this snippet:

Note: you may also want to hide the suspend action button.

PayPal Standard communicates with your WooCommerce store using IPNs ( and PDT, if you have it set up, but it’s not as common). For the most part, IPNs are still the standard method of sending information back to a WooCommerce store, such as successful charges, subscription renewals, etc.

If you want to capture and log the payload of a PayPal IPN on your WooCommerce store, you can hook into valid-paypal-standard-ipn-request like this:

Customer use case

I have a client that is wanting to set up a subscription where the customer would select a product and it would allow them to select one or more weekdays. The cost of the subscription would be the total of the weekdays selected, and it would be a weekly-recurring order. What I’m wondering is if the Product Addons plugin would work with the Subscriptions plugin and allow the customer to go in and update their subscription to change the weekdays? So, they originally select Mon/Wed/Fri and then later on, if they wanted to could change that to Mon/Tue/Wed/Thu/Fri and have the subscription be updated, rather than cancelling and starting a new subscription.

Required plugins

• WooCommerce
• WooCommerce Subscriptions
• WooCommerce Product Add-ons
• Redirection
• WooCommerce Allow Same Product Switch (snippet)

Setup

1. Enable switching between grouped products
2. Create a simple subscription product with checkbox add-ons to represent the days of the week:
   
   
3. Create a grouped product, and link the simple subscription product and any other subscription product (it doesn’t matter which one):
   
   
4. Set up a redirect from the group product to the simple product. Make sure you select “pass parameters to the target”:
   
   

User experience

1. Customer purchases the simple product with various weekdays selected.
2. To change their subscription, customer clicks the Upgrade or Downgrade button from their My Account page (that text is editable):
   
3. Customer is taken to the product page, where they can select new options and check out:
   
   

Clear out completed & cancelled actions safely

Would you like to clear out the Action Scheduler 3.0+ completed and cancelled actions in a safe way? You can add this filter to your site:

add_filter( 'action_scheduler_retention_period', function() { return DAY_IN_SECONDS * 14; } );

This will change the scheduled action retention period to 14 days (instead of the default 30 days). After your completed actions get down to a reasonable number, you can then remove that filter.

You could also shorten it to one day, wait a day, then remove it.

Clear out pending actions safely

Speed Up Processing

The best approach is to just speed up the processing of actions so that the queue completes.

There are a few approaches for this, from simplest to hardest:

1. update WordPress, WooCommerce & Subscriptions. Specifically, if Subscriptions 3.0+, WooCommerce 4.0+, and WordPress 5.1+ are running, processing speeds should be much higher than with prior versions. If you aren’t already running those or another plugin that includes Action Scheduler 3.0+, the first step is to update to one of those. If you’re not sure, you can also load Action Scheduler 3.0+ as a standalone plugin: https://github.com/woocommerce/action-scheduler/releases
2. if the above doesn’t work, because it’s not processing actions fast enough, then it may be necessary to setup WP CLI runners. Two helpful guides on that:
   1. A general guide to using WP CLI: https://actionscheduler.org/wp-cli/
   2. A specific guide for running Action Scheduler via WP CLI on Pantheon: https://pantheon.io/blog/high-performance-background-processing-woocommerce-pantheon (the general approach is transferrable to other hosts)

Note: we used to recommend the Action Scheduler high volume plugin: http://github.com/Prospress/action-scheduler-high-volume/

This plugin will still work, but upgrading to AS 3.0+ will give all of the same benefits with the new async queue runner.

Clear out pending actions dangerously (you know what you’re doing)

NOTE: The queries below should be used at your own risk, on a staging site, etc.

Delete Data

If it’s not possible to speed up processing enough to clear the pending actions, then it may be necessary to clear the queue by deleting pending scheduled webhook actions.

This is only safe when you know the pending webhook actions aren’t necessary. For example, reporting plugins like Metorik use Webhooks as a backup data sync method, so they canbe safely synced. Some services will require these webhooks, in which case, it’s not safe to simply delete them.

To delete the actions:

1. deleting logs and metadata for those scheduled webhook actions
2. deleting all scheduled webhook actions

The queries to do this:

1. Delete logs for scheduled webhook actions

DELETE lg FROM wp_actionscheduler_logs lg
LEFT JOIN wp_actionscheduler_actions aa
ON aa.action_id = lg.action_id
WHERE aa.status LIKE 'pending'
AND aa.hook LIKE 'woocommerce_deliver_webhook_async'

2. Delete trashed scheduled webhook actions

DELETE FROM 'wp_actionscheduler_actions'
WHERE status = 'pending'
AND hook = 'woocommerce_deliver_webhook_async'


Other Helpful Queries

Query to find actions processed in a 1-hour window (update dates to suit):

SELECT hook, COUNT(*)
FROM wp_actionscheduler_actions
WHERE status = 'complete'
AND last_attempt_gmt > '2020-05-08 06:30:00'
AND last_attempt_gmt < '2020-05-08 07:30:01'
GROUP BY hook


Query to find pending actions in the past:

SELECT hook, COUNT(*)
FROM wp_actionscheduler_actions
WHERE status = 'pending'
AND last_attempt_gmt < '2019-02-08 00:00:00'
GROUP BY hook