Qala 3.2.4 is released!

Qala 3.2.4 is here and has LOTS of exciting updates. It went quickly from Qala 3.2.0 to Qala 3.2.4, but here is a summary of all the improvements.

New release cycle

Starting with Qala 3.2.3, we will release updates as often as every two weeks. This is to get bug fixes out faster and to avoid building up very large releases. Qala has been a great commercial success and has been well received by our customers – especially in a recession where value for money needs to be considered very carefully.

New pricing model & public price

Qala now has three editions – Light, Standard & Premium. In this way, we make Qala accessible to both those with a slightly smaller budget and those with slightly higher requirements. The basis is the same and it is possible to switch up and down between packages. At the same time, we are opening up the pricing model so that it is completely public and transparent – at least for our E-commerce offering as well as our website offering. Our learning platform offering is still fairly bespoke and customised for each customer, but is expected to be ready later in 2023.

Performance improvements

We’ve been working extremely hard to get good performance improvements, especially on the front-end. After intensive work, we improved the performance so that Qala performs extremely high out of the box. Not bad! To achieve this result, we had to utilise the full power of our infrastructure and make smart solutions. It is because of these improvements that we have split the pricing into Light / Standard / Premium, where the server capacity and microservices that we run are packaged primarily in the “Standard” and “Premium” packages.

A “normal” WooCommerce site has about 25 in page speed, and a “normal” headless site has 40 in page speed, so we are quite happy with the result. Here you can read how we got WooCommerce to get 90 in page speed.

New plugin: Qala Elastic Filters

When you have thousands or hundreds of thousands of products with different variations, filtering becomes both complicated and slow. Qala Elastic Filters feeds all products to Elastic Search and can then be used for searches and filtering. This makes product filtering super fast.

You can have both portrait and landscape filters, but landscape is the default.

A handy feature is if you have many colour variations, you can choose to filter out the unique colour. It is also possible to bundle many colour variations together, which can be useful if, for example, you have many variations of a certain colour and want to make it easier for your visitors.

New plugin: Qala Single Admin

Qala Single Admin is a plugin that helps synchronise changes across a multisite network. The plugin requires you to use MultilingualPress and link different attributes (e.g. the “sale” category in one site is linked to “sale” in another site). Once this is done, bulk actions can be done across a multisite network.

In this first release, we are focusing on automating category changes, and then adding more features in the future as needed.

New plugin: Qala Reviews

One problem with a multisite architecture is synchronising reviews. In Sweden, for example, you might want to show the English reviews and the Norwegian reviews – but if you have an instance for Americans, you don’t want to sync Norwegian and Swedish reviews there. Qala Reviews solves this and provides customisation options for each site in a multisite network.

Qala Minicart updates

We have worked on the basic look of the minicart module we have in Qala, but we have mainly created the opportunity to make up / cross-sells based on the products you added to the checkout.

New Gutenberg blocks

Latest posts

With the latest posts block, you can easily bring in the latest post/product/etc from any post type in WordPress. The block also has a built-in slider that can come in handy if you have many posts you want to display.

Shop Categories

The Shop Categories block is for easily displaying categories and taxonomies rather than products. It is similar to the Latests Post block, but has a different purpose and thus works a little differently, but contains the same slider.

Accordion & Single accordion

This block allows you to either create single accordions or create accordions supported by images.

Improved product page in WooCommerce

For our customers who use WooCommerce, the product page has received a major improvement. Above all, we have greatly improved up/cross-sells. We have also done a major redesign of the administration interface. This part is still handled with more traditional “forms” until we think WooCommerce is ready for block-based building with Gutenberg.

Improved button management

In WordPress there is no way to manage the size of buttons – you can set the WIDTH of buttons but not the overall size, or specify icons. We have now created a concept framework for this that can be used as is or extended as needed.

Support for WordPress 6.x

We now have support for the latest version of WordPress! This means that the editor has been given a big boost. With this, we can now control how the column system works in a way we couldn’t before (and thus create editors with customisation options), but this also fixes a lot of bugs in WordPress.

Bug fixes

We have of course fixed lots of annoying bugs. The rollout of Gutenberg is moving very quickly and many features that were previously missing are being resolved – but of course this means that there are a lot of things that need to be fixed.