Changelog

StoreMaster 3.1.1 gives the plugin one short name everywhere you meet it inside WordPress. There is nothing to reconfigure, and nothing you have set up changes.

What reads differently

• The admin menu is StoreMaster.
• The block you add in the editor is the StoreMaster block.
• The panels on an order and on a product, and the plugin's notices and messages, all say StoreMaster.
• In WooCommerce's payment settings, the purchase-order method is listed as Purchase order (StoreMaster). What your customers see at checkout is unchanged.

Where the full name stays

The WordPress plugin directory still lists it as FileDeck Store Master for WooCommerce, and that is the name on your Plugins screen. It is the same plugin, and updates arrive exactly as before.

Thirty-six capabilities, each described by a name and a sentence. That is a lot of reading to do before you know whether the thing you want is in there.

Every one of them now has a picture.

On the Modules screen

Each card leads with a small drawing of what that capability does to a shop: a search box above a product grid, two price tags with the lower one picked out, a document leaving one box for another. Grouped as they already were — finding products, choosing one, what it costs, trade accounts, cart and checkout, after the order — the page is now something you can scan rather than read.

And on this site

The home page has a new section showing all thirty-six with their pictures, in the same order a customer meets them. It answers the question the rest of the page does not: not "what is this for" but "what is *all* of it".

That section is generated from the plugin itself — the capability names, the descriptions and which edition each belongs to all come out of the build. It cannot advertise something the plugin does not have, or describe it differently from the way the plugin does.

StoreMaster 3.0.1 is a maintenance release, and we recommend updating. There is nothing to reconfigure.

Fixes & improvements

• Security and reliability improvements throughout.

You no longer need to download Pro and upload it by hand. The free plugin has an Upgrade link in its own menu: buy there, and Pro is installed, switched on and the free copy switched off, with your configuration carried over.

Opt-in, and only opt-in

The upgrade runs through Freemius, which also delivers Pro's updates. When you activate the free plugin, Freemius asks whether you want to share basic information about your site. Decline, and nothing is sent.

One name for everything you type

Shortcodes, the WP-CLI command, the REST routes, the developer hooks, the admin page address and the webhook headers all use one name now, storemaster: [storemaster_table], wp storemaster module list, /wp-json/storemaster/v1/, X-StoreMaster-Signature. If you placed a shortcode or call one of these by hand, update it.

The plugin's folder and main file are now filedeck-store-master, matching its address on WordPress.org. Updating from 2.38.0 switches the plugin off once and does not carry that version's settings over, so switch it back on under Plugins.

Fixes & improvements

• Having the free and Pro copies installed at the same time no longer stops the site with a fatal error. The second copy stands down and a notice says which one is running.

Thirty-six capabilities in one column, in the order they happened to be written. That is a list you read once and then scroll past, and it gives you no way to answer the question people actually arrive with: *what does this plugin do to my shop?*

They are now grouped by where they land in a customer's visit.

Finding → choosing → paying → after

Finding products is how a shopper gets to the thing they want: search, filters, product tables, quick view. Choosing a product is what they configure before they buy — options, variations, live preview. What it costs is the price they are shown and why. Trade accounts is who the customer is, what they may see and how they buy. Cart and checkout is getting from a full basket to a placed order. After the order is what you and the customer receive once it is placed.

Running the plugin is the last group, and the only one a shopper never sees.

Reading down the page is now reading through a visit to your shop, which makes it obvious where a gap is — and which of your six plugins a capability here would replace.

And a find box

Thirty-six is too many to scan even grouped, so there is a box at the top. Type part of a capability's name, part of what it does, or its id if you have one from a support reply.

A group with nothing left in it after you type stops being shown, so the screen narrows to what matched rather than keeping six empty headings.

Choosing what kind of shop you are building has always been three steps — pick one, see exactly what it will switch on, then work through what is left to you. It just never looked like three steps. Each arrived as a new page with nothing to say it was part of anything, or how much was left.

You can see where you are

Choose · Review · Finish, across the top, with the stage you are on marked and the ones you have done ticked. Nothing about the flow changed — it is the same three steps, now visible.

Get started is where you start

It was the fourth item under Set up, which is the thing you need first filed where you look last. It now sits at the top of the menu, next to Overview.

The checks tell you what needs attention

Before you choose anything, the plugin checks your store — PHP and WooCommerce versions, database tables, background jobs, HTTPS, whether another plugin overlaps. Nine checks, and if a single one needed attention it printed all nine, eight of them green ticks, above the question the screen exists to ask.

It now shows what needs attention and nothing else. The ones that passed are one click away if you want to see them, and a store with nothing wrong still collapses to a single line.

Fixes & improvements

• Each kind of shop has a button that names it — "See what Wholesale & B2B does" — instead of six buttons all reading "See what this does", which anyone using a screen reader hears as six identical controls.

Splitting the control centre's sections into four last week fixed the problem of twelve screens under one heading, and created a smaller one: seven headings in a row across the top wrapped onto two ragged lines, each sitting above a fragment of its own list rather than the whole of it.

They are now a list down the left-hand side.

Easier to find things

Each heading sits directly above its own items, the section you are in is clearly marked, and the find box is at the top of the list where you reach for it. The list grows without the layout falling apart, which the row did not.

On a narrow screen — a phone, or a browser window shared with something else — it goes back to a row across the top, which is the right shape there.

A licence notice that is not shouting

If your licence lapses, the control centre explains what that means: your shop keeps running exactly as it was, and what becomes read-only is editing the paid modules' settings. That explanation is worth reading once. It was printing in full on all twenty-five screens, where a permanent amber block stops reading as information and starts reading as something being broken.

The full explanation now appears on the Overview screen, where you land. Every other screen carries a single line — including the part that matters most, that your shop is unaffected.

Fixes & improvements

• WooCommerce ships two shipping methods both called "Local pickup". A trade tier's Hide shipping methods list showed two identical checkboxes with no way to tell them apart, so you could easily hide the wrong one. Methods that share a name now show which is which.

Yesterday's update gave each control centre screen a heading naming the screen you are on. It did not remove the one that was already there, so every screen showed the plugin's name and then the screen's name, one above the other.

Only the screen's name remains. The plugin's name is in your sidebar, the menu and the browser tab already — repeating it at the top of all twenty-five screens was the problem the heading was supposed to solve.

Yesterday's update renamed the control centre's sections. A screen that still asked for one of the old section names ended up in neither the new sections nor the catch-all More list — so it disappeared from the menu entirely, even though its page still worked and you could still reach it by its address.

Anything in that position now appears under More, which is where a screen the plugin does not recognise has always been meant to go.

Nothing to do. If a screen you expected was missing from the menu after updating, it is back.

The first thing you see on a screen you have never used is the thing it has nothing on. Five of them answered that with a row of column headings — Group, Status, Shown as, Options and no rows, which tells you nothing and looks identical to a screen that has failed to load.

They now say what the capability is for.

What changed, and where

Product options explains that a group asks the customer something on the product page — an engraving, a finish, a size cut to order — and that one group can apply to many products, so you set up "Engraving" once.

Product tables explains that a table lists products as rows a customer can order from directly, and that you place it with a shortcode or the block — which you would not guess from an empty table.

Trade tiers explains that a tier is a group of customers who see their own prices, and that creating one gives you a real WordPress role to assign.

Trade applications no longer says "Nothing here." It says where applications come from, what approving one does, and reminds you the one you are looking for may be under another tab.

Live preview used to open as a lone number box and a Load button, with nothing to say what to type or why. It now explains what a preview area is and where to find a product's id.

Fixes & improvements

• These five now use the same explanation panel as the screens that already had one, so an empty screen looks the same wherever you meet it.

The control centre has twenty-five screens. Twelve of them sat under a single heading called "Sell" — product tables, product options, variations, live preview, wholesale tiers, promotions, quotes, the order desk, access passwords and three trade screens, all in one list.

A heading over half the plugin is not a heading. It is now four.

Four sections instead of one

Catalogue is how your products are presented: tables, options, variations and live preview. Pricing is what things cost: wholesale tiers and promotions. Customers is who is buying and what they may see: trade applications, the trade form, trade emails and access passwords. Orders is what has been asked for: the order desk and quotes.

Set up, Rules and Health are where they were.

And a find box

Four sections make the list scannable. They do not make "where do I set a wholesale tier" answerable without reading every label, so there is now a find box at the end of the navigation. Type part of a name and the menu narrows to what matches.

Type something with no matches and it tells you so, rather than quietly showing you an empty menu — and Overview stays where it is, so a mistyped search never leaves you stranded.

Two things that were wrong on every screen of the control centre, and are now right on all of them.

Every screen has a heading

There was no page heading. The only one in the markup was the message shown when JavaScript is switched off, so in normal use each screen's sections sat under nothing at all — and anyone using a screen reader arrived at a page with no title to tell them where they were.

Each screen now leads with its own name, taken from the same list the navigation is built from, so the heading always matches the link that brought you there.

It matches your admin colours

WordPress lets you pick an admin colour scheme in your profile. The control centre ignored yours and used the default blue, which made it the one screen in your admin that looked slightly foreign.

It now follows whichever scheme you have chosen. Nothing to set — if you use Midnight or Ocean, it already matches.

Fixes & improvements

• The heading on a screen whose name is a prefix of another screen's — trade applications and trade emails, for instance — now names the right one.

A filter panel only ever narrowed the list it was standing on. Put one anywhere else — a landing page, a sidebar, a footer — and it drew itself, took a click and did nothing at all.

It now sends the shopper into your shop with that filter already applied.

The easiest way to use filters

This turns out to be the setup most shops want, and it needs no template editing at all. Put a panel on your front page with the facets you care about — finish, size, price band — and each option becomes a way into the catalogue. A shopper picks "brushed brass" on your landing page and arrives at your shop showing brushed brass.

It is the same filter either way. A selection has always been a plain URL, so it can be bookmarked, shared and linked from a campaign; this simply means a panel can build those links from anywhere rather than only from the shop.

Still narrows in place on the shop

Nothing changes on your shop or category pages. A panel there keeps working as it did: tick something and the products below it change, with no page in between.

The help centre now explains both, and which one you get depends only on where you put the panel — there is nothing to configure.

Fixes & improvements

• A filter panel outside your shop no longer produces links that lead back to the same page unchanged.
• The "Clear all" and "remove filter" links on such a panel now also point at your shop, rather than stripping filters from a page that never had them.

The number beside each filter option is supposed to answer "how many if I also tick this". On a category page it was answering for your whole catalogue instead — so a category could offer you an option that led to an empty page.

That is fixed, and the help centre's advice on where to put a filter panel has been corrected along with it.

Counts that match what you get

Open a category page with a filter panel on it and every count now describes that category. Tick the option showing eight products and you get eight products.

An option with nothing to show in the current view is no longer offered at all, which is the behaviour that makes counts worth printing: a filter list you can trust is one where nothing in it is a dead end.

Where a filter panel actually goes

The help centre told you to put the shortcode on your shop page. On a block theme — which is every theme WordPress has shipped since Twenty Twenty-Two — your shop is a template rather than a page, and a shortcode typed into the Shop page's content never runs. The advice was wrong, and it has been rewritten.

It now walks you through both kinds of theme. On a block theme you add the panel to your Product Catalog template, either with a Shortcode block if you want control over how each filter looks, or with the StoreMaster block if you just want to pick the facets and move on. On a classic theme the shortcode in your Shop page content works as it always did.

The article is also straight with you about which placements narrow a list and which only draw a panel, so you are not left wondering why a panel on an ordinary page does nothing.

Fixes & improvements

• A filter panel on a category page no longer offers categories it has nothing to show from.
• Ticking two categories on a category page now correctly shows only the products that are in the category you are browsing.

Shop managers have been granted permissions for your catalogue, product options, order emails and order documents since the beginning — and could not open the plugin to use any of them. Every menu item refused them.

That is fixed. A shop manager now opens StoreMaster and sees exactly the screens their permissions cover, and none of the others.

What a delegate can and cannot do

Each screen carries its own permission, and the menu shows only what a person holds. Someone who handles your trade applications sees trade applications — not your pricing rules.

Turning modules on and off stays with administrators. Deciding which parts of the plugin your shop runs is a different kind of decision from using them, and it is not delegated.

Nothing to configure. If you have staff in the shop manager role, they will find the plugin in their sidebar after this update, with the screens they are entitled to.

If you would rather they did not

Remove the plugin permissions from the shop manager role with any role editor, and the menu disappears for them again. Permissions have always been the control; they simply had no effect on the way in until now.