New in Restrict Content Pro 3.5
Today, we’re excited to release Restrict Content Pro version 3.5. This release is focused on better support with Stripe. We’ve got new features relating to renewals in Stripe, fixes for Stripe payments and the biggest piece; updating the Stripe API.
New in Restrict Content Pro 3.5
As this release had a heavy focus on our Stripe integration, we added a few features to make your life a little easier with renewals and refunds with Stripe. Let’s dig into the features and fixes of this release.
Stripe Renewals and Payment Calculations
Many of our customers have been asking for some assistance in putting together a better plan for how to handle failed/succeeded payments. Previously, if a subscription failed a payment it would immediately remove access to the content for that member and wait until the payment succeeded. Once it succeeded the member was granted access to the membership again and all was well.
The problem with this approach was that when the payment succeeded it would not change the next billing date. This was problematic because if it took 3, 4, 5, even 10 days to get the payment succeeded, your member would be charged again on the original subscription state date. Let me give you an example.
So if your member purchased on the 10th a membership level that renewed monthly, ideally your member would be charged on the 10th of every month. But let’s say their payment failed and took until the 20th to get a successful charge. Your member would then get charged again on the 10th of the following month, which means it results in an issue where your member isn’t getting the full value of that month’s membership (because the moment of a failed membership occurs, they will not have access to your membership site until the successful charge happens).
Site Admin Updates to Subscription periods and durations
A new highly requested feature now enables you as a membership site admin to login to your site and update the subscription period and duration of a membership. This allows you to do things like give a member a free period of time or give you more control over the management of individual memberships.
Mark Stripe Payments As Refunded
Previously, when you refunded a payment in Restrict Content Pro, that did not get communicated back to Stripe. We heard from a number of customers that it was problematic that both RCP and Stripe weren’t displaying the same data. So we introduced the ability to automatically mark payments as refunded through the webhook listener.
In order for this to work, you will need to make sure that you have your Stripe webhooks setup and working properly. Here’s a quick video on setting up Stripe with Restrict Content Pro, including setting up the webhook listener.
Stripe SDK & API Updates
Probably the biggest unnoticed update in this release is that we’ve updated the SDK version we’re using. We’ve now moved to the Stripe SDK version of 7.52.0. We’ve also moved to using the latest version of the Stripe API.
Both of these updates lay the groundwork for introducing more Stripe specific features into Restrict Content Pro. If there’s a feature of Stripe, you’d like to see, we’d love to hear about them. Leave us a note in the comments.
Bug Fixes and Minor Updates
There were also a number of bug fixes and updates that are included in this release, also around our Stripe integration. These are smaller code related issues and for the most part, most of our customers never experienced issues with these.
- Fixed an error when updating Stripe card for cancelled Stripe subscriptions
- Fixed the ability to ensure that Stripe profile js is not triggered until the DOM has been loaded
- Fixed an issue where the Stripe registration failed, it doesn’t incorrectly try to retrieve the stripe intent object from the payment_intent.
- Replaces stripe.handleCardPayment and stripe.handleCardSetup functions with their new functions as they have been deprecated.
- Refactored the stripe.js script to remove the “rcp-” pre-filename from the script.
- Improved error message handling when attaching payment methods to a customer.
Staying Updated
We’re going to be introducing a number of new features with our Stripe integration over the next couple of months. We’re excited to provide you with more features that give you and your members a better experience.
As we always tell our iThemes customers, you want to make sure that you backup your site prior to doing any upgrades. We recommend our sister product BackupBuddy. You can backup your site on a regular basis and store your backups in any storage location you want. Learn more about BackupBuddy.
Wrapping Up
We’re excited to get this update out to our customers. It starts our path towards providing more Stripe related features to Restrict Content Po and we’re thrilled to have this out and available to you today.