Description
The purpose of this plugin is to schedule future updates for Woocommerce products. Create a scheduled update, make the required modification, set an update date that it will automatically happen on the set date and time.
This plugin it’s the perfect choice if you are planning any changes in your products and want to prepare them ahead so that all product changes take place at the same time. It’s the perfect choice for times like Black Friday when you want to have mass price reduction instantly.
Documentation
Creating a scheduled update
When editing a product, in the “Publish” box you will have some additional information and actions, for a product that doesn’t have a scheduled update yet, you will get a message telling you that and a link to create a scheduled update.
Clicking the link will create an identical product and save it. From there you can go ahead and make your desired modifications to the product.
Working on the scheduled update
To find your product updates you have a few choices:
- Go to the original product and look for the scheduled update information in the “Publish” box on the right, click on “edit”.
- Go to the “All Products” page under Woocommerce admin menu item, each product will now have a new column with information regarding their scheduled updates, all products that have a scheduled update will have links to view and edit the scheduled updates.
- Go to the “Product updates” page under the Woocommerce admin menu item, here you will see a list of all the scheduled updates, and the new column will contain information regarding their original product, and the options to edit and view them.
When modifying the scheduled update you will see that the only thing missing will be the permalink editing option, we left that out on purpose to make sure there will not be any problems with affiliate programs and similar situations.
Apart from this, the scheduled update should be modified like any other product. The extra field that you have available to complete is the “Update date”, which you will see in the new box above the “Publish” box, set the desired date and time there or leave it empty if you are just using the scheduled update as a sandbox to test changes to your product.
Publishing a scheduled update
There are three possibilities for publishing the updated product:
- Setting a scheduled update date and waiting for it to arrive, that’s when the product will be updated with the new changes.
- Going to the edit page of the original product and clicking the “Publish changes now” in the “Publish” box.
- Going to the edit page of the scheduled update and clicking the “Publish changes now” in the “Publish” box.
No matter which one happens, the same process occurs, all the modifications will be set on to the original product, and the scheduled update will disappear.
Elements added by the plugin
The “Publish” box
The publish box will be modified on all products and will display the following:
Product with no scheduled update:
- Notification that the product does not have a scheduled update
- Link to create a scheduled update
Product with a scheduled update:
- Information about the scheduled update (Title, ID)
- When the scheduled update was created
- View, Edit, Publish now actions for the scheduled update
- Date of automatic publishing
- Warning that the original product was modified after creating the scheduled update if that is the case
Scheduled update product:
- Information about the original product (Title, ID)
- View, Edit, Publish actions for the original product
- Warning that the original product was modified after creating the scheduled update if that is the case
Publish date box
This box will appear above the “Publish” box only on Scheduled update, it displays the date and time selection box and info regarding when the scheduled update was created.
Notifications
To make sure that the person editing the products knows that a product has a scheduled update, or that he is making changes to a scheduled update we added a notification bar above the content form.
Handling time
Automatic publishing of the scheduled update will be done taking into account the Timezone setting from WordPress.
Example: if the website is targeted at the German market, the Timezone setting from WordPress should be set to a city from Germany. The scheduled update should be set at exactly the date and time you wish the changes to happen according to German time. If you chose to use manual UTC time please note that most countries change their GMT for Daylight savings time, so be aware of the actual GMT in the country you target.
Handling the scheduled updates
To avoid conflicts and losing information due to incorrect management of scheduled updates, each product can only have one scheduled update at any given time.
If you are not happy with the changes you made in a scheduled update and it would take too much effort to revert to the original state, delete the scheduled update and create a new one.
Compatibility with other plugins
This plugin is working using standard WooCommerce and WordPress methods, it should be compatible with all plugins that are developed correctly.