What’s New With Kernl – December 2017

Happy December everyone! It’s been a busy month at Kernl. We’ve got a few great new features completed, some infrastructure updates, and a few bug fixes. Let’s get started.

Features

  • Customer Management – With the release of our new License Management product we introduced the concept of “customers”. As one would expect, a customer is someone who you assign a license to. The reason we introduced this was so that you could have multiple licenses associated to a single person and easily manage those from a single place. This is a huge improvement over the previous iteration and I highly recommend that you check it out. Hop over to the “License Management’ page and then click “Manage Customers”.
  • Customer Management API – In addition to the new customer management area in the app you can now access the customer management API. There are a lot of different ways that people purchase your plugins and themes so exposing a rich API is the best way to allow integration with Kernl. If you’d like to learn more, check out the documentation.
  • Purchase Code Migration – If you are a user of the legacy “purchase code” system you can now migrate all of your existing purchase codes over to the new license management system. When you go to the license management page there is a big call-out at the top when you can migrate your purchase codes. If you do this, make sure to update your plugin_update_check or theme_update_check file and where you instantiate the Kernl update class. Documentation for using the new license management system can be found here.
  • License Domain Restrictions – You can now restrict updates that are secured by license management to specific domains.

Minor Features & Bug Fixes

  • The web app has been upgraded from Angular 1.3.x to Angular 1.6.6. This is one of the first steps in a migration path forward to the next generation of Angular and a web app UI refresh.
  • You are now able to refresh the Git repository list that Kernl has with the press of a button. Before you had to disconnect/re-connect the integration.
  • In the interest of moving quickly, the first pass of license management and customer management did not have any tests written for it. This month we added a suite of tests around both APIs so that they remain stable.
  • Our back end application servers have been upgraded to Node.js 8.9.1. This brings security updates as well as new language features.
  • The license management documentation was updated to include links to the WordPress Settings API documentation. Kernl doesn’t make any assumptions about how your plugin or theme is developed, but people often ask what the easiest way to get licenses into their app is. The WordPress Settings API is likely the easiest, so it’s now mentioned in the documentation.
  • Meta tags have been added to the marketing site so that shares to Twitter look richer.
  • There was a bug in feature flags where individually targeted flags did not toggle on/off correctly.
  • All packages on all servers have been updated with the latest security fixes.

That’s all for this month! Have a great holiday season everyone!