[Plugin: WP-Invoice – Web Invoice and Billing] Not quite ready for for my needs.. Too bad.. looks li

Does WP3-Invoice still exist? I cannot find it.

As for WP-Invoice – I love the idea and usability. But it looks like Authorize.NET (ARB) recurring invoicing is not really supported, even though the website leads you to believe it is. According to multiple forum posts, it just sends out email at the recur interval. The credit card is not charged ??

Also – when creating an invoice, I don’t understand two things:

– why is ‘Send Invoice’ (under the ‘Recurring Bill’ checkbox) there? I don’t want an email sent. This is (in my usage model) an ARB charge auto-generated by Authorize.net ARB, not by WP-Invoice.

– why doesn’t ‘Billing Cycles’ (also under the ‘Recurring Bill’ checkbox) have a hint to help you understand how to say ‘infinite’. I have invoices I want to send every month until the customer cancels.

Does WP3-Invoice still exist? I cannot find it.

Elliot took WP3-Invoice out of the WordPress repository, and sadly he doesn’t even have it available on his site as an unsupported free download.. I may put it up on my site now that I am thinking about this.. I would have to make sure that I remove my custom template.. But there’s some improvements I made in my custom template that I might make part of the default template if I do put this up and make it available on my site..

There’s a LOT that’s good about WP-Invoice, but sadly there is SOOOOOO much more that needs improvement.. I make the comparisons to WP3 Invoice because this plugin IMHO was done very well, and it’s too bad Elliot decided to stop working on it.. The features were awesome; from the use of a custom post type (without character restrictions), options to carbon copy the site owner when sending out quotes/invoices, the fact that it worked with PayPal’s IPN functionality to return payment confirmations correctly, very well done and customizable templates for both the customer e-mail as well as the invoices/quotes themselves, etc. It really was a very well done plugin which was built with all kinds of businesses in mind as users of it.

There were only two shortcomings with WP3 Invoice which is why I looked at WP-Invoice to begin with:

• Recurring Billing
• Support for partial payments

However after using WP-Invoice for a while, I found that so many things that WP3 Invoice did right are not done as well in WP-Invoice.

I tried to live without the custom templates (and the ugly invoices and quotes that were produced by the plugin as a result), not getting copied when invoices/quotes went out, the odd language used for things like logging partial payments, and the fact that PayPal payments were not updating correctly (so I had to manually mark my invoices paid).

I tried to live without all of this because support for partial payments and recurring billing were important.. HOWEVER, being limited as to how long my quotes/invoices could be was the final straw for me.. I could put up with the features not being as nice or nice looking, but preventing me from writing quotes/invoices because I exceeded some silly RANDOM character limit makes this plugin nearly useless for me..

– why is ‘Send Invoice’ (under the ‘Recurring Bill’ checkbox) there? I don’t want an email sent. This is (in my usage model) an ARB charge auto-generated by Authorize.net ARB, not by WP-Invoice.

– why doesn’t ‘Billing Cycles’ (also under the ‘Recurring Bill’ checkbox) have a hint to help you understand how to say ‘infinite’. I have invoices I want to send every month until the customer cancels.

Someone else brought this up as well in another post.. I wonder if the PayPal recurring billing works the same.. I have never gotten a chance to really look at how recurring billing works for PayPal, but if they are not using the PayPal API for recurring billing this makes recurring billing less than helpful for my needs..

It’s really sad, that you want to use plugin that doesn’t exist any more instead of WP-Invoice. We’re trying to improve our plugins to meet our customer needs. That’s why we have Feedback site, that needs your ideas, you can add any idea, that can improve plugin for you. We systematically implement most rated ideas, that increases number of our customers and we have ability to continue improving our plugins, that’s why we’re not going to stop.

Denys it may be sad, but I have a invoices and quotes to send to clients and potential clients, and I need a solution that allows me to do that TODAY.

I understand that you guys are making improvements, and hopefully you guys will get WP-Invoice to a place where I can use it as I would like. However, in the MEANTIME what do you suggest that I do?? My clients are NOT gonna understand when I tell them “Hey I can’t send you a quote right now because my invoicing/quoting software won’t allow me to send out quotes longer than 2655 characters.. But hey.. if you can WAIT for –ummmm I don’t know how long– the developers of WP-Invoice are are trying to improve their plugins to meet their customers needs.”

The fact is that your plugin isn’t working well for me TODAY. So yes sadly I have to continue to use a plugin that doesn’t exist anymore because TODAY that plugin works for me. I would LOVE to use WP-Invoice, but it’s not doing what I need TODAY, and I have work I need to do TODAY..

And YES I have posted all of this on your forum AND the feedback site. I’m sure eventually you will fix the issues with partial payments and the issues with long quotes/invoices that I reported.. But what should I do in the MEANTIME??? WAIT?? Suspend invoicing and sending out quotes?? Go back to MANUAL quotes and invoices?? Go back to PayPal invoicing?? So sadly for now I have to use another plugin that I KNOW works..

Sure for partial payments my client has a workaround for now.. Create TWO invoices.. One for the initial payment and another for the final payment.. Not pretty or elegant, but doable and effective.. She needs the features the Facebook Connect plugin offers and it doesn’t play well with the WP-Invoice partial payment feature.. So until I find another plugin which offers the SAME features of Facebook Connect (particularly the post to Facebook publishing feature), this is how she’ll continue to use your plugin.. I’ll have to evaluate for future clients on a case by case basis if/how they can use WP-Invoice..

For myself however, until you remove the the character limits on invoices/quotes, I will continue to use a plugin that doesn’t exist anymore.. Seriously, this is a “feature” that should never have been introduced especially if invoices/quotes are supposed to be simply a custom post type for WP-Invoice..

I believe, partial payment works and we’ll remove that limitation in next release, it’s already in the list since our last dialog, but we unfortunately can’t do it today…

Denys,

There is some sort of conflict between your plugins partial payment code and the Facebook Connect Plugin. Are you saying that this is resolved???

No, I’m saying that WP-Invoice partial payment wokrs. Are you talking about Simple Facebook Connect? What kind of conflict?

Goodness.. I already reported this.. There is some kind of conflict with your plugins partial payments functionality and the Simple Facebook Connect plugin..

I tried creating a custom page for invoices/quotes to hide the SFC fanbox hoping that this would solve the issue, but no dice. Turning off SFC is NOT an option for my client as the FB publishing feature and the fanbox are BIG parts of her website.

There are other Facebook apps for WordPress, but it would take TWO or more plugns to match the functionality of SFC which is why it’s one of the more popular FB plugins.. and I have a sneaking suspicion that ALL of these FB plugins would have the very same issue..

Let me be clear.. I really don’t expect that you will try to make you plugin work with every single plugin out there, but I would hope you would at least investigate when there are issues with popular plugins (which I think Facebook plugins –especially SFC since it’s one of the more popular one– qualify as) in case there is really an issue with your plugin that you haven’t noticed.. I know from my years of IT experience that sometimes until something specific triggers a problem you may not know it even exists..

In the meantime I know that for clients who want/need features in SFC and WP-Invoice that they will not be able to use all of WP-Invoice’s features.. (like partial payments) **shrug**

Thank you. We’ll investigate that issue.

Good to hear.. Because whatever the conflict is it ONLY affects partial payments.

For all of those having issues with WP-Invoice and Simple Facebook Connect, here’s how to fix it (temporarily, until it gets overwritten by an update)

Open the following file: plugins > simple-facebook-connect > sfc.php. On line 65, you’ll see some code that loads the sfc-base.php file if the PHP and WordPress core are of a specific version or greater. It looks like this:

if ( !version_compare(PHP_VERSION, '5', '<') && version_compare( $wp_version, '3.2.999', '>' ) ) {
	 include 'sfc-base.php';
} else {
	add_action('admin_notices', create_function( '', "echo '<div class=\"error\"><p>".__('Simple Facebook Connect requires PHP 5 and WordPress 3.3 to function. Please upgrade or deactivate the SFC plugin.', 'sfc') ."</p></div>';" ) );

}

Change it to this:

if ( !version_compare(PHP_VERSION, '5', '<') && version_compare( $wp_version, '3.2.999', '>' ) ) {
	if( substr($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"], 0, 11) != '/invoicing/' ) {
		include 'sfc-base.php';
	}
} else {
	add_action('admin_notices', create_function( '', "echo '<div class=\"error\"><p>".__('Simple Facebook Connect requires PHP 5 and WordPress 3.3 to function. Please upgrade or deactivate the SFC plugin.', 'sfc') ."</p></div>';" ) );

}

Essentially, what you’re doing above is only loading the Simple Facebook Connect plugin on the page if the Request URI does NOT include ‘/invoicing/’. Hope this helps someone!

do you still have issues? what exactly?

If Simple Facebook Connect and WP-Invoice are installed, invoices allowing partial payments will break… Essentially, when you go to select the radio button for the partial payment (on the invoice page), it doesn’t update or reflect the correct amount. It looks like more of a problem with SFC than WP Invoice. The SFC plugin should allow you to select custom post types to load the Graph code to save unnecessary calls to the script, but there is no provision for it. Checking the request URI makes it easy enough to disable it on the invoice pages.

I will take a look again into this. Thanks.

PHIL!! You are a ROCK STAR!! Thanks for identifying the source of the issue.. Now hopefully one (or BOTH) of the authors of these plugins can (and will) update their plugins to stop this issue from happening.. Your description of the issue is what I reported on the WP Invoice support site MANY months ago. It’s why I haven’t been able to install WP Invoice for my clients who use SFC. Perhaps there is a permanent light at the end of the tunnel now for this issue.. I can use the workaround on my own site, but maybe now that the problem has a little more traction perhaps a perm solution may be around the corner.. This would finally mean that I can push this plugin out to my clients.