Ordergroove’s Subscription Manager is continuously evolving to deliver the best possible subscriber experience. There are two main theme versions – v0 and v25 – that are currently live and available. The latest version (v25) of the Subscription Manager gets ongoing sub-version improvements that include bug fixes, performance enhancements, and new features like Cancel Flows.
Upgrading your SM ensures you'll continue to have direct access to any new features Ordergroove releases. This article will walk you through how to review, approve, and implement Subscription Manager upgrades so you can stay up to date without losing your customizations.
Before You Start
If you haven’t made custom changes to your Subscription Manager, your template is automatically updated whenever a new version is available and you’ll get access to those upgrades immediately. If you’ve customized your experience at all, some updates require manual approval to ensure your edits are preserved and applied correctly.
You will need the current version of your Subscription Manager:
- Open up Ordergroove and go to Subscriptions > Subscription Manager.
- Your Live Theme is on the left. There will be a Version listed, called Latest Version if your Subscription Manager is running the newest theme.
- The number listed next to the version will start with either 0.X.X.X (v0) or 25.X.X.X (v25), and will have a star if you're on the latest version.
Upgrading Your Subscription Manager
There are short steps to follow in order to update your Subscription Manager to the latest version. These will vary based on what version you’re currently using and if you've made edits using the Basic or Advanced Editor.
As a reminder, if you’ve never made any SM customizations with either the Basic or Advanced Editor, your SM will upgrade automatically with no action needed from you. If you’ve made basic or advanced changes, however, here’s how to upgrade to the latest version.
Upgrading your v25 SM to a newer v25 if you use the Basic Editor
Open up Ordergroove and go to Subscriptions > Subscription Manager. Click the copy button in your currently live theme to create a new draft, and give it a name.
The draft will appear on the right side, click on it to open it up.
Locate the Upgrade Version button in the upper right hand corner and click it.
The Upgrade Modal will pop up. Click the Upgrade button to continue.
Click the Save button in the upper right hand corner to confirm the changes.
And that's it! You’ve upgraded to your new Subscription Manager template. Please refer to the bottom of this article for quality assurance review and publishing your new template so subscribers can start using it.
If you have customized your SM by modifying Style, Copy, or Functionality settings in the Basic editor, the Upgrade Version button will always be available and will preserve your basic customizations in the upgraded version (like fonts, colors, copy). However, sometimes the upgrade button will be disabled. This is because you’ve likely made customizations to your Subscription Manager with the Advanced Editor. You’ll see the message below.
We'll cover upgrading your v25 SM with advanced customizations in the next section, please follow those instructions.
Upgrading your v25 SM to a newer v25 if you use the Advanced Editor
These advanced customizations mean you’ve made direct code customizations in the Advanced Code Editor.
If this is the case, you should coordinate with your developers that helped implement the code customizations to facilitate an upgrade. The usual approach is for the developer to create a new theme from scratch (rather than copying your current theme like in the first section of this article) so that you have a blank template on the latest version. From there, the developer can copy / re-implement the specific code customizations to the relevant or corresponding files in the newest version.
To get started: Open up Ordergroove and go to Subscriptions > Subscription Manager. Create a new draft by clicking the Create button in the upper right. Use this new draft as the baseline to copy customizations from the old version into this version.
We have developer tools that can help with Subscription Manager local development and facilitating upgrades that contain code customizations. Take a look at Subscription Manager Local Development in our developer documentation for more info.
Preserve Tracking
While making code customizations, be sure to avoid interfering with page tagging that’s there to help you track customer actions like cancel flow behavior and other order management actions. Refer to the Preserve Analytics Tracking while Customizing Subscription Manager Templates developer guide for more information on how to customize your SM code without breaking this tracking.
If you have further questions about upgrading your customized Subscription Manager, please reach out to the Ordergroove Support team.
Upgrading your v0 Subscription Manager to the latest version of v25
If you are on a v0 version of the Subscription Manager, you must create a new draft. The new draft will have the latest version of the Subscription Manager to use as the baseline for your new template.
You will need to re-configure the copy/functionality settings manually either in the Basic Editor or in the Advanced Editor following the steps listed out above in the v25→newer v25 upgrade steps.
How to QA and deploy your new template
1 - Check your work before going live
Some aspects of your styling should have transferred over, but let's make sure before you go live. You should see a live preview of what the new theme looks like on the right side of the screen.
Scroll down the page to make sure everything looks right. The preview is interactive, so you can test out any actions on the page. For basic styling changes, you can use the Styles and Copy settings panel. For advanced styling changes, please refer to this guide.
We also recommend previewing these changes DIRECTLY on your site. Click the preview button in the upper right hand corner and follow on-screen instructions to preview these theme changes against a real demo account in your live site’s Subscription Manager.
2 - Go Live
Once you are happy with your changes, you're ready to complete the upgrade process. Click the triple dots and publish once you are ready.
Once the publish button is selected, this draft will replace the currently live theme. The previously live theme will move to the Drafts section if you ever need to roll back the changes.