It doesn’t snow here in Queensland (Australia) but we’re still in the end of year spirit (going ‘troppo’), looks like that beer fund is almost ready to be tapped!

Just a quick note for Premium support availability during the holiday season before diving into some fun end of year details, drop a comment on what Plugin feature you want Santa to bring you this year; only 15 sleeps to go!

Holiday hours

Visser Labs will be operating at a limited capacity between the 25th of December (naturally) and 1st of January as well as the 8th to the 14th of January; it’s miles away, I’ll be cleaning up my Inbox queue before then, don’t fret! In between then, expect prompt responses (we’re doing our best), regular Plugin updates and the possibility of some new major enhancements for some of the suite Plugins (e.g. Printable Invoices and Product Enquiry).

Plugin updates from abroad

During the year I’ve been exploring my country of origin as well as a decent slice of South East Asia by air, road and sea, bet you didn’t even notice me gone; 3G is everywhere! Here’s a few shots from the trip.

Psst, there’s a 15% discount on Plugins till the end of the year on the hidden page. 😉

Achievements

We’re coming up just shy of 2 years here at Visser Labs (store opened Jan. 2010) with 32 consistent releases of new free and Premium Plugins. I’ve had a blast working with store owners, contracted developers as well as fellow developers (you know who you are!) on Plugin collaborations and enhancements across the Plugin suite.

Here’s some examples of where we’ve come from:

• Product Importer Deluxe started as a set of custom Page Templates
• WP e-Commerce 3.7 remains the easiest release to develop for, Custom Post Type’s as awesome as they are add a whole new complexity to working with WP e-Commerce
• Wholesale Pricing was in it’s beginnings a readme.txt with a list of PHP instructions to support WP e-Commerce 3.7; WP e-Commerce 3.8 includes hooks and filters so removed the need for Core changes
• I only started charging for supporting Plugins after store owners strongly suggested I either issue an invoice or PayPal link for the service my Plugin/s had done
• My favourite feature of WP e-Commerce that’s missing is the Store menu within the WordPress Administration!

Going forward

My attitude to development and communication is going to ramp up with the recent expansion to support the WooCommerce and Jigoshop community on top of the established WP e-Commerce camp. Worth a mention, WooThemes are tackling support for their Plugins (Product Importer Deluxe, Store Credit, etc.), please raise enquiries and support questions via the WooThemes Support facilities. WP e-Commerce and Jigoshop support  remain managed here via Live/Premium Support.

From the Visser Labs team, we wish you, your family, and your store happy holidays; don’t let that store slag off too much though!

All the best going into 2012. 🙂