Photo by David Rangel via Unsplash
Time certainly flies! It has been over a year since the first release of Gravity PDF v5.
When it launched, we made a promise to our users to provide an additional 12 months support, security and maintenance for Gravity PDF v4. This was to allow a smoother transitional period to v5, which included a bump in the minimum software requirements, and a few breaking changes. As of today, v4 has reached its end of life If you are still running v4 (or earlier😬), we strongly recommend you update to Gravity PDF v5 as soon as possible – start with our upgrade guide.
Flashback: This is your Life
Version 4 was first released in June 2016. It was quite a momentous occasion, as this was the first release that included a UI – previously everything was configured through a PHP file 😜. It was also when we decided to go all-in on Gravity PDF as a plugin (no more side-project status for you 😃).
It was basically a full rewrite, and because of the significance of the release, upgrading wasn’t smooth for some of our users. Thankfully, between the extensive testing we did prior, the update guide published, and our team’s amazing support (if we don’t toot our own horn, who will 😁), the majority migrated to version 4 without any major incidents.
As of today, Gravity PDF v4 has reached its end of life, and will not receive any further support or updates. Upgrade to version 5 immediately.
Features introduced in version v4 included:
- UI for configuring PDFs on forms
- UI for installing custom fonts
- Four Core PDF Templates
- CSS Ready Class column support in PDFs
- Shortcode and merge tag PDF links
- Pagebreak support in Core PDFs
- PDF Conditional Logic
- PDF Template Manager for installing premium and custom templates
- Launch of the PDF Template and Extension Shop, which further enhanced Gravity PDF
- Support for various third party Gravity Forms plugin
During its lifetime we shipped 5 minor and 11 patch releases. There were 440 commits in GitHub, 35,418 lines of code added and 9,769 removed across 280 files.
Photo by Fabian Grohs via Unsplash
Upgrade Instructions
Everything you need to know about upgrading to version 5 can be found in our documentation. But if you just want the cliff notes, the TL;DR version is as follows:
- Take a full backup
- Update all out of date software, except Gravity PDF e.g. PHP, WordPress, Gravity Forms
- Update any out of date Gravity PDF Extensions or Templates (download from the account page)
- Update Gravity PDF
- Run the Core Font Installer from the PDF Settings Tools tab
- Verify everything works correctly
If you run into problems, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our friendly support team!
Wrapping it up
Speaking of our team, we’ve started growing up (and out), and now have a team of six talented people working to make Gravity PDF even better! We know this year has been light on the updates, but that’s because we’ve been focused on putting in place better quality control systems, and paying off our technical debt, to ensure a great experience moving forward for the 30,000+ users that rely on Gravity PDF. The next 12 months will be exciting and we can’t wait to have you along for the journey.
Until then: happy PDFing!
