STM Smart Checkout for WooCommerce – free checkout with legal information for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (DACH region).

version 0.1.47

• The trust row and the reassurance note reach the block checkout. The row of small trust items sits under the buy button, where the last doubt happens, and the reassurance note under the consent box it comments on — the same markup, the same settings and the same stylesheet the classic checkout uses, read from one place so the two can never drift apart.
• Measured first, because the reasonable guess was wrong: the block checkout offers no hook under its button and no slot either — the four Slot/Fill points WooCommerce exposes all sit in the order summary. What does work is appending markup after a block, and the checkout's React tree leaves it alone: ​​through the first paint, and through re-renders while a customer types.
• The block stylesheet no longer depends on the legal module. A shop that lets a legal plugin handle consent kept its buy button, fields and cards unstyled on the blocks, because the whole layer hung on one switch. The design travels with the plugin now; the button label, the consent box and the legal line still stand down with the module they belong to.

version 0.1.46

• The block checkout carries the plugin's design. Every step of the Checkout block is a card now — the same background, border, radius and shadow as the classic sections — with the classic numbered title: a disc in the title blue counting contact, address, shipping and payment, and the accent rule beneath. The additional information block and the order notes keep the card and skip the number; they are addenda, not steps. The order summary heading speaks in the same voice. All of it is stylesheet only, hung on the block's own class names as measured on WooCommerce 11, and switched off with the plugin.
• Not attempted, and said so: the three-column choreography of the classic checkout. The block offers no wrapper for two independent columns of steps, and a grid would couple the address and payment columns row by row — a tall payment step forcing an equally tall blank next to it. The layout setting keeps applying to the classic checkout only, as the settings screen states.

version 0.1.45

• The legal core works on the Cart and Checkout blocks. A required consent box for terms and cancellation policy is registered through WooCommerce's additional checkout fields, so the Store API validates it on the server — a checkout request without the tick, or with it set to false, is refused before an order exists — and the order carries the moment of consent and the exact sentence agreed to, as it does on the classic checkout. The links to both texts stand one line above the buy button, in the place WooCommerce reserved for legal text, and open in the plugin's overlay. The buy button carries the label from your settings; the blocks never read the classic filter, and what looked compliant on German shops so far was WooCommerce's translation of "Place order" and nothing more.
• The design tokens reach into the block form: the buy button, the fields, the section titles and the order summary wear the same accent, radius and type scale as the shell around them. The shell itself — full-page template, trust band, step indicator, legal footer — has worked on the blocks all along; it hangs on page hooks, not on the classic checkout's rendering hooks, which is more than the previous FAQ answer allowed for.
• The mandatory notice and the delivery time follow. The notice from your settings — the essential order details the courts want readable right before the decision — shares the line above the buy button with the legal links, in body size where the links stay quiet. The delivery time under each item rides on WooCommerce's own item data, the mechanism the Store API and both blocks already render under a product name: it appears in the cart block and in the checkout's order summary, resolved from the same sources as on the classic checkout (the product's own value, a legal plugin's delivery term, the shop-wide default), stands down for virtual items and where a legal plugin labels the item, and is printed once even on a shop whose cart is classic while its checkout is a block.
• Not on the blocks yet, and said so on the settings screen: the column layouts, the field manager and postcode autofill, the trust row, the reassurance note, the coupon and order-note controls. Every piece above stays out on WooCommerce older than the additional-fields API; the classic checkout is unaffected there.

version 0.1.44

• The logo field no longer promises something the checkout does not do. Its help text said an empty field falls back to your site logo; the header band actually prints your site title as text, which is what the code has always done. A shop owner who left the field empty expecting a logo got a line of text and no explanation. Both help texts now describe the behavior, and say out loud that the site logo and this field are different places in WordPress.
• The German translation follows the WordPress glossary. The German polyglots team pointed at the glossary and the style guide when granting editor rights, and four terms did not match it: Knopf is Button, Kästchen is Checkbox, Fußbereich is Footer, and Site is Website. 38 places in each of the two German catalogs, with the article corrected wherever the gender changed with the word — a Kästchen is neuter, a Checkbox is not, and a blind replacement would have left "das Checkbox" behind in a dozen sentences. Translations are delivered by WordPress.org and are not part of this package.

version 0.1.43

• The links to our own pages sit at the end of the description instead of its second line. A shop owner opening a directory page wants to know what the plugin does; a link to the vendor's shop before the first feature reads as an advertisement, whatever it points at. Both language sections now describe the plugin in full first and name the pages afterwards, where someone who has read that far might actually want them. The first link is now halfway down the description rather than in its opening. No code changed.

version 0.1.42

• The links in the description are links. WordPress.org renders a readme with a Markdown subset — bold, lists and headings came through, but a bare URL stays plain text, so every address in the description sat there unclickable. They are written as proper links now, with the product's name as the anchor instead of the address, which is also what a search engine reads. The two attribution links in Credits had the same problem and are fixed with them. No code changed.

version 0.1.41

• The description says what the plugin actually does. It listed eight bullets for a checkout that has closer to twenty settings worth naming, and it described the paid add-on as "three things" when it has carried seven since the end of August — an understatement is as inaccurate as a promise, and this readme has been on the wrong side of that before. Both product pages are linked now, in the language of the section that links them, and the German half spells out the legal features under the words a German shop actually searches for: Button solution, § 312j BGB, cancellation form, general terms and conditions checkbox, VAT statement, delivery time. Two questions were added to the FAQ, one of them stating plainly that the online withdrawal form required since June 19, 2026 is in Pro and not in this plugin. No code changed.

version 0.1.40

• The plugin's own homepage link no longer leads to the paid version. The Plugin URI in the header pointed at a path that redirects to the Pro product page, and WordPress.org publishes that header field as this plugin's homepage — so the free plugin's link led to a sales page for a different product. It now points at this plugin's own page. Both header URLs are the English ones, because the directory listing is written in English; the German product pages are carried by the German translation of those fields, which is what translatable header URLs are for.

version 0.1.39

• The settings screen loads its stylesheet and its script as files. Both were printed into the page as a style and a script block, which renders the same but skips everything WordPress does around an asset: a version the caches can see, one place from which a site can dequeue or replace them, and markup that stays out of the middle of the form. The distraction-free module's extra hide rules take the same route and hang off the checkout stylesheet now instead of being written into the page head — and the child combinator survives their sanitizer, so "header > .bar" hides that bar rather than everything below the header.
• Values ​​written into a style element are stripped of the characters that could leave it. The word between the express buttons and the form is translatable, and a translation is a string from outside the code: one carrying a closing style tag would have ended the element and turned the rest of the declaration into markup. The color and size tokens pass the same filter, applied late, where the value is written into the CSS rather than where it was read.
• Translations come from WordPress rather than from the package. The plugin no longer calls load_plugin_textdomain and no longer ships compiled .mo files: for a plugin in the directory, WordPress delivers translations into wp-content/languages/plugins/ and loads them on the first translated string without being asked, so a bundled copy would only give one language two sources — of which the packaged one is always the older. The Domain Path header goes with them, because it points to a folder the package no longer carries. The German translation stays maintained in the source repository and goes to translate.wordpress.org, where anyone who finds a better word can correct it.

version 0.1.38

• The shipping-address switch speaks in the checkout's voice. Its label carries the text, so a theme's label rules land there rather than on the heading around it — Basel sets 22px and uppercase on .woocommerce-form__label, and that one line shouted at 66px while the rest of the checkout spoke normally. Font size, weight, letter spacing and casing now inherit from the row, stated on the label and on the span inside it, because which of the two a theme targets differs.

version 0.1.37

• Customers can enter a different shipping address again. The rule that steps the theme's own section headings aside — so the plugin's numbered titles can take their place — also caught the shipping block, and WooCommerce does not put a heading there: it puts the "Ship to a different address?" checkbox inside that h3. Hiding it removed the only control that opens the shipping address and left an empty card in its place, on every shop that offers shipping. The shipping block is now excluded from that rule and its heading is styled as what it actually is: a switch, in the body font, with a 44px tap target. Reported from a live shop; the two test shops had never rendered the section, one forcing shipping to the billing address and the other selling a virtual article.

version 0.1.36

• The plugin now says it when your cart and checkout are built from blocks. A stock WooCommerce install renders both pages from the Cart and Checkout blocks; this plugin extends the classic cart and checkout, and none of its hooks fire inside the blocks. Until now that combination was silent in every direction: the settings screen offered its full set of options, the checkout kept looking exactly as before, and WooCommerce said nothing either — because the plugin declares block compatibility, which is true (it breaks nothing) and which switches off Woo's own warning. The settings screen now names the affected pages above the tabs, states plainly that nothing below will change what customers see, and offers to switch those pages to the classic cart and checkout in one click. The block markup is kept in the page's meta, so the way back is one click as well and stays visible for as long as the switch is in place. The same note appears once on the plugins list, where it can be dismissed.

version 0.1.35

• Preview mode can be left again. Once a shop manager had opened the preview, every later visit showed the Smart Checkout while the settings screen kept saying "off" — which reads like a broken switch. ?stmc_preview=0 (also "off", "no") clears the cookie and takes effect in the same request, and the settings screen now says out loud whenever the cookie is set: preview is on for you, this is why the checkout looks switched on, customers still see the standard checkout — with the link that ends it. Customers were never affected.

version 0.1.34

• Delivery time per line item — the last piece a shop without a legal plugin was missing in its checkout. Shown under every product in cart and checkout, resolved from the most specific source that knows one: a value typed onto this product (new field in the product's Shipping tab) wins, then Germanized's own delivery-time term (variation falling back to parent), then the shop-wide default. The stmc_delivery_time filter has the last word for shops that calculate it from stock, a supplier feed or the shipping zone. Where a legal plugin already states the delivery time for a product, this one stays away — decided per product, not per shop.

version 0.1.33

• The two blues become settings. The step-heading blue and the field-label blue were hardcoded in the token file, which made them the only colors a shop could not change; both are color settings on the Design tab now, with their current values ​​as defaults, so nothing shifts visually. They stay deliberately separate from "Heading color" — labels are read while filling in, headings while orienting, and one color for both flattens the form into a gray block. The reassurance note moves back between the consent boxes and the buy button, where it comments on the consent right above it.

version 0.1.32

• The order summary states its VAT. With gross prices WooCommerce prints no tax row at all, reasoning that the price already contains it — so on a shop whose legal plugin has stopped rendering, the summary charges VAT and says nothing about it. The checkout now states it itself, one row per tax rate beside the other money lines, wherever no legal plugin is doing it. The percentage comes from the tax rate, never from its name: shops name their rates, and a legal statement must not depend on what someone typed into a settings field.

version 0.1.31

• Lite and Pro become two plugins. The withdrawal complex, the mobile sticky order bar and the ultra-compact layout move to a separate STM Smart Checkout Pro plugin, so the free plugin neither carries nor loads paid code. Lite grows the extension points that make an add-on possible instead of a fork: stmc_settings_fields, stmc_admin_tab_fields, stmc_admin_tab_{slug}, stmc_layouts, stmc_layout_labels and public row helpers, so both plugins speak one visual language. New STMC_Settings::layout() resolves the effective layout from the raw option, so a stored layout whose provider is momentarily absent degrades to its nearest relative instead of silently falling back to the default.

version 0.1.30

• The checkout stands on its own legally. For shops with neither Germanized nor German Market, the plugin now owns the buy-button label wherever no legal plugin sets one (§ 312j BGB) — previously a compliant label arrived only by way of WooCommerce's German translation, which is accidental compliance, not compliance. Priority 5, so anything hooking later keeps the last word, and a setting for shops with their own wording. Plus a slot for the information that must be readable in the same glance as the button, printed inside the place-order row so it travels with the button wherever the layout moves it. The settings screen now says plainly what the plugin does not cover when no legal plugin is present.

version 0.1.29

• Font size in pixels. The type scale had one knob expressed as a percentage of rem, which handed the real size to the theme's root font size — the same setting rendered differently on two shops. It is a pixel value now, with every step a fixed ratio of it, chosen to reproduce the previous scale exactly at the 15px default; the old percentage is migrated rather than reset. Payment rows stay one row: a gateway setting display:block inline on its own rows made the block-level label start a new line, stranding the radio above it — an inline-flex label sits beside the radio there and is blocked back to flex where the row is flex, so nothing changes elsewhere. No !important involved.

version 0.1.28

• The consent box detects the legal plugin itself. The switch becomes a three-way choice with Automatic as the default: the box asks the checkout whether a legal plugin is actually printing consent boxes, and only steps in when none is. Asked by hook, never by "is the plugin installed" — that distinction is the whole feature: a legal plugin can sit there active and configured and still render nothing, and a presence check would leave such a checkout with no consent at all. The decision is recorded and shown on the settings screen, because automatic behavior nobody can inspect is how a checkout ends up legally naked without anyone noticing.

version 0.1.27

• The checkout can carry its own legal consent — one required checkbox for terms and cancellation policy, seated between the grand total and the buy button, rendered with WooCommerce's own terms-wrapper class names so the existing card chrome, switch and invalid state apply. Links fill themselves from the pages the shop already registered; a placeholder whose page is unknown keeps its plain words instead of producing a dead link. Server-side validation reuses the existing required-checkbox path, and the acceptance is written onto the order together with the exact wording shown — a stored "yes" pointing at today's text proves nothing about last year's order. Order notes become a one-line disclosure at the end of the address column, so the field that hardly anyone fills stops costing a card and a step number.

version 0.1.26

• DHL preferred services join the payment column, right under the methods — the integration only re-prioritizes their hook, so everything Shiptastic built (its script, refresh behavior, conditions) keeps working untouched. And a new default makes the totals block third-party-proof: any unknown row a plugin prints into the totals now lands after the grand total automatically — extras can never interrupt the money story again.

version 0.1.25

• First member of the integration family: Shiptastic (+ DHL). The pickup-location offer ("Not at home?") no longer interrupts the address fields mid-flow — it closes the address block as a quiet card. DHL's preferred services (delivery-day tiles, drop-off location, neighbor) speak the checkout's design language now and settle after the grand total, where delivery fine-tuning belongs. The adapter is guarded (no-op without Shiptastic) and never forks the plugin's behavior — the pattern every future integration follows.

version 0.1.24

• Order summary thumbnails survive theme lazy loaders. Basel's lazy filter swapped the image source for its placeholder and lost the original along the way — the thumbnail rendered briefly, then stayed empty. The markup is now hand-built from the attachment URL, untouched by the attachment-image filter pipeline any lazy plugin hooks into; browser-native lazy loading still defers offscreen images, variations fall back to the parent image, missing images to the WooCommerce placeholder.

version 0.1.23

• The full-page checkout footer configures itself and bends to your will: pick the exact pages in the backend (multi-select), or a whole menu — and without any choice the line now fills itself with the legal pages your site already registered (Germanized's imprint, privacy and withdrawal pages, WooCommerce's terms page, WordPress' privacy page), published pages only, in reading order.

version 0.1.22

• Order summary round from the second-shop review. Product images now render reliably in the summary regardless of the legal plugin (when Germanized already provides one, no second image is added). Quantity steppers beside each product let customers fix amounts right at the checkout — changes run through WooCommerce's own refresh with all totals, stock limits and sold-individually respected; a setting turns them off. The coupon prompt is owner-switchable too: shops that never issue codes can retire the field that sends customers code-hunting.

version 0.1.21

• Distraction-free works on every theme now: on themes without a built-in adapter, cart and checkout render through the plugin's own minimal full page (template_include) — the theme's header, menus and footer are never built at all, while styles, analytics, consent tools and chat widgets keep working. A configurable legal-links line under the checkout keeps imprint, privacy and terms reachable (pick your legal menu in the backend; the WordPress privacy page is the minimum fallback). Adapter themes (The7, Storefront) stay on their native path; owners can force the template on or off.

version 0.1.20

• Theme-proof layout round, measured on a second shop (Basel theme, Bootstrap checkout template). Theme templates that wrap the billing and order anchors in their own grid markup (a .col-sm-6 gave the billing column 50% of its 50%) become layout-transparent — the checkout grid now always places the anchors themselves, whatever the template wraps them in. The default template's "Product / Subtotal" table head is retired (our column title already labels the area; as a re-flowed line its two cells overlapped). Gateway description boxes with intrinsically sized badges (Klarna) can no longer be pushed past the card edge. Themes without a server-side adapter get a narrow distraction-free CSS fallback: the page-title hero banner and the breadcrumb step aside while the screen-reader heading keeps the page named.

version 0.1.19

• Context translations restored: the rebuilt language files had silently lost every msgctxt entry (the page slug and the state-field labels fell back to English) — found on the first install on a second shop, where the withdrawal page appeared with a German title but an English slug. The build tool now writes GNU context keys correctly, and the page self-heal treats title and slug independently, so existing installs fix their slug on the next upgrade (WordPress keeps the old-slug redirect).

version 0.1.18

• Plugin Check green again: the help-icon markup escapes its id at the exact output spot (a pre-escaped variable is invisible to the reviewer's static analysis), and reading WooCommerce's order-notes switch carries its documented justification.

version 0.1.17

• Withdrawal round from the live review. The form pre-fills with the customer's data — logged-in customers get their billing details plus their most recent order suggested (number, date, address), everything editable. The address is entered as single fields exactly like the checkout (street, postcode, city) instead of one big blob. The form speaks the checkout's design language now: white card, label blue, 46px controls, choice cards for the scope, a full-width call-to-action. Fixed: German shops got a page literally titled "Withdrawal" — the text domain loaded after the page was created; the priority is corrected and existing untouched pages heal themselves (title and slug, WordPress keeps the old-slug redirect). The last untranslated strings are gone. New: the order-notes field ("Additional information") can be switched off in the backend.

version 0.1.16

• Every setting now explains itself: a "?" icon next to each label opens a plain-language help bubble — what the option does, the background, and when to use it. Hover, focus or tap; Escape closes. The help texts live in one map, so the short inline hints under the fields stay untouched. Fully translated.

version 0.1.15

• The one-column layout is actually one column now. Without its own rules the theme decided — The7 turns the checkout form into its own two-column flexbox, so "one column" silently rendered like "two columns". The layout is a centered 760px flex column: express buttons keep their order, then billing, then the order block, everything stacked.

version 0.1.14

• Compact review round: on shipping-free carts the "Additional information" section (order notes) moves under the payment methods instead of dangling as a lone card below the address — the numbering follows the story (payment becomes step 2, the notes read as a quiet sub-block). First/last name (and postcode/city) now sit on exactly the same line: WooCommerce's float-era margin-top on .form-row-last The grid pair was tilted by 6px.

version 0.1.13

• Parity round with the live shop's proven checkout, plus a new layout. Step numbering now follows the form flow (1 billing details, 2 additional information, 3 payment — the order summary is the unnumbered constant); step heads grow to the measured 1.15rem in the title blue with the number in a matching disc. Field and payment-method labels speak in the label blue at content size. Consent boxes and "Create an account?" become modern switches on individual white cards. In the order column the totals table now leads, consents and the buy button follow, and the money lines re-order so the grand total closes the column with zebra rhythm on the quiet lines. Payment and order share ONE wide card split by a soft center line (three-column stage now starts at 1160px). The express area gets its measured title size and a translated "OR" divider. New: an ultra-compact layout — the three-column stage one type step down with tight cards and fields, modeled on the Magento edition; on touch screens density yields to reachability (16px field text, full-height targets).

version 0.1.12

• Plugin Check housekeeping — the remaining review warnings are resolved: request values ​​in the withdrawal form and the postcode lookup are unslashed and sanitized before use, withdrawal table queries use the %i identifier placeholder (WordPress 6.2+), and the deliberate direct calls to the plugin's own table carry documented justifications. No functional change.

version 0.1.11

• One typographic system across all three checkout columns. Section titles now run in the body font instead of the theme display face (a checkout is one surface, not three widgets), payment method names drop from the theme reading size to content size so the middle column stops shouting, brand icons follow the type down, and the scale is down to five deliberate steps driven by tokens: fine print, secondary, content, controls, emphasis. Adds a --stmc-fs-xs token and raises content size to 15px.

version 0.1.10

• Consistent typography in the order summary. WooCommerce wraps every amount in its own price elements and themes style those wrappers directly, bypassing the cell — on The7 that meant a 13px tax label alongside an 18px amount, three different blues in one column, and a grand total rendered in a completely different font family. The price wrappers now inherit from their cell, so each amount matches its label in family, size and color, with weight alone marking the value and the grand total as the only emphasized line.

version 0.1.9

• Payment method rows are flex rows: a gateway with a wide brand icon strip (credit card) no longer pushes its label onto a second line, stranding the radio button above it — an inline-flex label is atomic and cannot break, so it dropped as a whole. Radio buttons now match the consent checkboxes at 18px. Order summary: rows get horizontal padding so labels and amounts no longer touch the card edge, the theme's gray table background is dropped in favor of the card surface, and row separators are drawn on the row instead of the cells (as flex items the cells were split by the column gap, breaking each line into two segments).

version 0.1.8

• Design round on the three-column layout: fixed column numbering 1 address / 2 payment / 3 order (the CSS counter told the story backwards because WooCommerce renders the order markup before the payment markup); the address and additional-information titles were accidentally hidden by our own heading rule. Consent boxes: consecutive cards merge into one quiet group, text flows as a normal block with hanging indent (WooCommerce core's inline label + line-height 2 gates it apart). Order summary: rows rebuilt as label-left/amount-right lines against The7's stacked block cells, product names wrap instead of truncating, tidy 44px thumbnails; Germanized's relocated duplicate "Your order" heading hidden.

version 0.1.7

• Legal round: server-side safety net for required consent boxes (an order without a required tick is rejected even when the browser check was bypassed — and stays silent when WooCommerce or Germanized already reported the same box, extendable via the stmc_required_checkboxes filter). Optional reassurance note under the consent boxes. "Create an account?" info tooltip whose wording is derived from your own registration settings.

version 0.1.6

• Postcode autofill for DE/AT/CH from bundled databases (no external service) — the city fills in automatically, multiple matches feed a native suggestion list. Mobile sticky order bar: total + buy button pinned while the real button is out of view; the proxy click runs every native validation.

version 0.1.5

• Three-column checkout layout (billing / payment / order) — the most compact arrangement, selectable under Design. Express area polish: WooPayments' English separator hidden, gateway description rhythm, theme content padding removed on checkout surfaces.

version 0.1.4

• Consumer rights: online withdrawal form (EU withdrawal function) — auto-created form page for guests and customers, automatic menu placement from the backend, "Withdraw this order" in My Account, soft order matching that never blocks a submission, merchant notification + customer receipt emails, and a management screen with status workflow under WooCommerce → Withdrawals.

version 0.1.3

• Legal module: terms and withdrawal texts open in an accessible overlay without leaving the checkout (native link behavior as fallback). Styled legal checkboxes, order table refinements, cart page round: tidy table columns, checkout button before wallet buttons, quiet update button.

version 0.1.2

• Design round on live The7 + Germanized shop: express payment areas stack tidily above the columns, theme percentage-width traps neutralized in the grid, field pair grid (name, postcode/city), payment method rows with contained brand icons, empty section shells lose their card chrome.

version 0.1.1

• Core checkout modules: header band with progress and login toggle, distraction-free mode with theme adapters, numbered section titles, two-column layout, field improvements (state handling, mobile input attributes), trust elements. German (formal and informal) translations.

version 0.1.0

• Initial foundation: settings framework, design token system, checkout context detection, module registry, HPOS and cart/checkout blocks compatibility declarations.