It’s been a little over 7 months since we promised Groundhogg 3.0, which was our promise to revolutionize self-hosted CRM and marketing automation for WordPress.
Everyone’s been quite anxious to see progress and a concrete release date, so let me lay down some context and provide some insight into where our team is at.
Groundhogg 3.0 will make doing business easier, but it’s not ready yet and has a ways to go before it can be released, we’re aiming for a Q3 launch date.
What’s Groundhogg 3.0 all about?
One of the things that I haven’t enjoyed recently is telling customers they have to wait for a feature that will only come in 3.0. It’s taking a while to get there, which means the wait for results is longer. That being said, it will be well worth the wait!
We’re cracking down on our top feature requests and making them happen! Our mission is to provide you with the features that are going to enable you to conduct business online the way you want to!
Here’s what we’ve been working on in Groundhogg 3.0.
- UI and UX updates across the board
- New toolbar quick access helper widget
- Better template libraries with more temapltes, searching and filtering, previews
- Block based email editor
- All new Funnel Editor design
- Improved broadcast scheduling
- New reporting dashboard and custom reports
- Product management & billing cycles in Really Simple Payments
- Invoices and Payment requests with Really Simple Payments
- Charge for appointments with Really Simple Payments
- Pipeline deals integrated with Really Simple Payments
- Automatic RSS email broadcasts.
Improved Funnel Editor!
The biggest improvement of 3.0 is the funnel editor! We spend top dollar on top-tier devs and UX/UI designers to bring you the best funnel editing experience on the market.
- Contextual guides in the funnel flow
- Auto-generated step names
- Undo/Redo states in funnels
- Improved publish cycle, make changes without them going live until you hit update, all changes are autosaved!
- Improved timer settings, form builder, and more.
- Step packs, searching, and filtering
- Accessible color scheme
- Same screen email editing and creation
- All new form builder
Contact Filters and Searching!
Being able to find contacts is kind of important. Up till now the search filters in the frontend have been kind of limited. But now you’ll have access to so many filters you won’t know what to do with them all!
Create “And/Or” rulesets to filter contacts by a plethora of search criteria, like last login date, location, tags, email activity, and more.
New Reporting Dashboard!
Having access to more data means you can make more informed decisions. In addition to a visual refresh, you will also be able to create custom reports!
New Toolbar Widget!
Access common Groundhogg tools quickly from anywhere in the admin dashboard. Search for and create contacts, schedule a broadcast, send an email, and more!
New Block-based Email Editor
Our take on a Gutenberg-powered block-based email editor will have you creating beautiful emails easily.
New Campaigns Features!
Think of Campaigns like tags for funnels, broadcasts, and emails. You’ll be able to associate any marketing activities back to a campaign for better reporting and content organization.
3.0 is not so straightforward.
3.0 is not as straightforward to build as I had originally imagined it would be. In many cases, we are completely redesigning fundamental aspects of how Groundhogg works, and that means breaking changes.
For many reasons, it’s difficult to release a product with breaking changes because that would cause many of our 40+ extensions to no longer work, third-party integrations to fail, and countless other custom solutions built on top of Groundhogg to stop working.
Before building a new feature, or redesigning an existing feature, we have to create a migration path so that we can ensure the way we are building the feature will encompass anything that’s already been built by you with Groundhogg, like funnels, emails, forms, etc. This takes time, more time than anticipated, and is the main reason why my release date projections were way off. I’m very sorry about that. Lesson learned!
What we don’t want to do is release 3.0 prematurely and have things break. That would be a disaster for our customers. We need to build a flawless update path so that anything you’ve built so far will continue to work flawlessly in Groundhogg 3.0. It’s taking a bit more time than anticipated, but we want it as close to perfect as possible.
So when is the release date for 3.0?
At this point, it’s hard to say. We’ve made significant progress in the core plugin. However, there are still core features which need to be built and dozens of extensions and plugins which need compatibility updates.
We’re continuing to work on it feverishly, but we’re also going to make sure that our existing versions of tools get the love that they need to make getting results with Groundhogg easier, which adds time to the overall project.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, I don’t know exactly when it will be ready. My hope is Q3 of this year, but it could still take a while. We want to give you a superior product. In addition to that, we want the video tutorials, documentation, and product pages all to be ready for you as well.
