A few months ago WordPress announced that they planned to update the version of jQuery included with Wordpress. More details on their plan can be found here, with an additional update that jQuery Migrate removal is currently planned for version 5.8. The aXcelerate Enrolments Plugin currently makes use of an older jQuery library called jQuery Mobile, which has not been updated to work with newer jQuery versions. As such, to ensure future compatibility with WordPress, on Wednesday March 31 2021, we will be releasing a new version of our aXcelerate Enrolments Plugin (Version 3.0), which no longer relies on the jQuery Mobile library. Version 3.0 of the plugin also includes some changes to make maintenance and styling easier going forward.
Version 3.0 will essentially function the same as the previous version, however there will be some slight styling changes made to the enrolment and enquiry form. During the configuration and customisation of our plugin on your website, there may have been some styling overrides created directly on your website that may no longer apply due to these changes.
After March 31, there are a few courses of action that your website administrator can take to ensure the experience for your students remains as expected. Once updated, it’s important to complete an end-to-end test to ensure everything displays as expected.
Update to the latest version of WordPress (5.7) and update your aXcelerate Enrolments Plugin to Version 3.0. For clients who do not already have auto-update enabled for our plugin, WordPress plugins can be updated from the Plugins tab of the WordPress dashboard by clicking ‘update now’ next to an outdated plugin. After March 31, if you do not have the option to update your version of our plugin, please contact our support team and we can provide you with the latest version.
When updating WordPress versions, we recommend that you follow the guidance and specific recommendations of WordPress themselves. When updating WordPress to the latest version, it is possible that you may encounter other incompatibility issues with your website theme or plugins from other vendors. These issues would be unrelated to aXcelerate’s Enrolments Plugin. Before updating your WordPress version, you can verify potential effects by using a testing plugin from WordPress which allows you to replicate the depreciation of the jQuery Migrate library and test changes ahead of time.
If you would prefer to remain on an older version of WordPress, you can still update to Version 3.0 of our plugin as it will operate with older versions of WordPress. If you have auto-update enabled for our plugin, it will automatically update after our release on March 31.
If you would like to be on the latest version of WordPress, but would prefer to use an older version of the aXcelerate Enrolments Plugin, WordPress has released a plugin called Enable jQuery Migrate Helper that can be installed which will allow our plugin to continue to operate as is. This is only an alternative if updating is not viable, as we always recommend that you maintain an updated version of aXcelerate’s Enrolments Plugin as it will be supported by our team, have the latest features, bug fixes and security updates.
After Version 3.0 of the plugin is released, we recommend you complete an end-to-end test with a dummy enrolment to ensure everything operates and displays as expected. If you would like to test the updates in a development environment first, you can disable auto-update for the aXcelerate Enrolment Plugin on your live website before March 31 and reactivate once you are satisfied with tests completed on your development site.
If you encounter any problems, please contact our support team, however, they will only be able to answer any questions or resolve problems directly related to our Enrolments Plugin. For any site wide issues or questions that cannot be resolved by your website administrator, you may need to engage a third-party web developer.
Thank you to everyone who attended our Work-Based Learning (WBL) feature webinar. We loved showing you the benefits of the feature and how it all works, and appreciate all the feedback and questions we’ve received so far.
