Your order backlog on the Joomla dashboard, and payments that finally say something useful on the order timeline.
Two updates land today. Core 1.3.1 is a maintenance release — no schema changes, nothing to migrate — and PayPal Checkout 1.0.2 picks up the payment-visibility work on the gateway side. They also clear the way for the new Stripe plugin, which ships alongside them and which we will cover properly in its own post. Here is what changed.
Your shop tells you when it needs you
Until now, finding out that three orders had been sitting unpaid since Friday required opening Solidshop and looking. That is fine when you are in the admin all day, and useless when you are not — which for most shop owners is most of the time.
Core 1.3.1 adds a Quick Icon plugin that puts the backlog on your Joomla administrator home page, next to the panels you already see when you log in. Three tiles: Pending orders, Unpaid orders and Unfulfilled orders. Each shows a live count, and clicking it opens the orders list filtered to exactly the rows it just counted — a tile reading seven can never open a list of four.
Pending is on by default and reads the same status you already set under Options → Pending order status, so the tile and the dashboard’s pending-orders alert can never disagree with each other. The other two are off by default, because a dashboard that fills itself up on install is its own kind of unhelpful — switch them on in the Plugin Manager, along with which dashboard panel the tiles sit in.
Tiles respect permissions. A user who would be turned away from the orders list is not shown a count of it.
Payments on the order timeline
Every Solidshop order has an Activity Timeline — status changes, emails sent, notes. Payments were the conspicuous gap: the money arriving was the one event it did not record.
It does now, and the wording tells you which path the payment took, because that is the part worth reading. A payment confirmed while the shopper was still on your checkout page reads plainly. One reconciled after the fact says it came from a webhook. A partial payment says it was partial. Underneath each entry sits the gateway transaction ID in muted type — the value you copy into PayPal’s or Stripe’s dashboard when you need to find the charge at the other end.
Entries deduplicate on that transaction ID, so a capture that gets reconciled twice — which happens routinely, since the browser and the webhook often report the same success — appears once.
PayPal Checkout 1.0.2
The free PayPal Checkout
plugin writes those timeline entries from all three of its
capture paths: the capture that happens at checkout, the
PAYMENT.CAPTURE.COMPLETED webhook, and a webhook that
resolves the order to paid by another route.
It also stops being anonymous in PayPal’s own activity list. Each transaction now carries a description built from your store name and the order reference, so you can match a payment to an order without opening it. PayPal caps that field at 127 characters, so a long store name gets trimmed — and dropped altogether if there is too little room left for it to say anything — while the order reference, which is the part you actually reconcile against, always survives intact.
One housekeeping change worth knowing about: the Webhook URL field is now supplied by the core component instead of by the PayPal plugin. Joomla resolves form field types from a single global namespace, so two payment plugins shipping a field type of the same name collided — with the visible symptom that one plugin’s settings tab showed the other plugin’s webhook URL. Moving it into the core fixes that for every payment plugin at once.
Updating
Core 1.3.1 is a one-click update from System › Update. There are no schema changes and no manual steps.
Update PayPal to 1.0.2 at the same time rather than later. Both payment plugins now require Core 1.3.1 as their minimum — their installers check and refuse against anything older — and PayPal 1.0.1 still carries its own copy of the webhook URL field, which is the collision described above. Core first, then the plugins.
For the complete, itemised list of every change in both releases, see the Solidshop changelog.