After countless hours of planning, designing, coding and changes in over 180 core files, we're thrilled to announce that LatePoint 5 is nearly here!
Today, we're excited to unveil the Beta version to all our amazing customers.
LatePoint 5.0 marks a significant milestone in our journey.
This release mainly focuses on changes that are mainly under the hood in data modeling, and it has laid the groundwork for bringing new features, flexibility and capabilities we want to bring to the LatePoint.
So, what's in store with LatePoint 5?
The major new features these data modeling changes will make possible are:
While we wanted to deliver all of these new features in a single update, LatePoint 5 will ship with the new visual booking form customizer, selling packages/bundles, multiple bookings at the same time, and the shopping cart. Once released we will work on the rest of the list.
New features will come much faster due to us laying out this new foundation for the future.
While we initially planned on shipping this new version this past January. Due to our high standards for the experience we want to give to our users, as we were building these major new features we had to rework major UI/UX components.
While we could have opted to compromise, one of the main reasons users choose LatePoint is due to our attention to detail and the perfection of our UI/UX. This is why it is very challenging to give time estimates for releasing new features for us because we are not willing to make these compromises and ship a subpar product.
We care too much about our users and our product for that!
Here are the features you can expect in LatePoint 5 and what is available today in the beta release.
The interface where you manage all your bookings has received a significant facelift.
This was perhaps the most challenging feature to implement because it required the most UI work.
We had to build new interfaces for purchasing the bundle, a new interface for the customer area to manage the bundle they purchased, and a new interface for the business owner to manage the bundle.
Now your customers will be able to book more than one service in a single order, making it more convenient to purchase more of your services.
When your customer chooses a booking, it will go into a shopping cart until they complete the booking. If they get distracted and come back to your website at a later time, the booking will still be in their shopping cart.
This new feature will also make it possible for us to build cart abandonment features in a future update.
Our goal with the visual booking form is to make customizing the booking form to match your use case and your branding a whole lot easier.
We will be releasing the first step in this direction with this release. Still to come is customizations of fonts and colors.
There are many additional refinements in LatePoint 5, and one that was highly requested by our users is the ability to set “week start day” from your WordPress settings.
Today we are making the first Beta version available to all of our customers. This Beta should only be used in a testing environment for the time being and not on production sites.
Also, we don’t advise you to upgrade a site currently using version 4 to the Beta for version 5 because the Beta version does not include data migration as we are currently working on that. The final release version will include the data migration for all existing sites.
The remaining work is all of our extensions need to be updated due to the data modeling changes. We are working on them one by one and have updated half of them.
The entire team is really eager to finally ship LatePoint 5 to everyone, but we also don’t want to compromise on our commitment to excellence.
With this new foundation we will be able to move much faster to continue to make LatePoint the best booking solution for WordPress.
We appreciate all the suggestions you have made on our Ideas Board and also thank you for your patience as we have been working around the clock to make this release happen.
This is an early beta, so please do not install it on a site that is currently using version 4 of LatePoint and do not use any of the addons, as they are not compatible yet.
