published by Carolin Wörner and Ramon Kupper ( Comments)

SilverCart 1.3.1 is published

There are quite some features and additions to our new version of SilverCart which you officially might not know about yet - unless you have directly accessed our Mercurial repository at BitBucket.

Now is the time to officially share some information about our latest release of SilverCart 1.3.1 and all the new features and enhancements it brings. Thanks to your great feedback, we could get rid of many bugs to make SilverCart a much smoother experience to use. We're always open for bug reports or suggestions for improvements to make SilverCart even better with every new release.

You can donwload SilverCart 1.3.1 in our download section or you can try our hosted demo and have your webshop up an running in no time.

Enhancements

  • Added possibility to define the description field for shoppingcart positions.
  • sort order of SilvercartOrderStatus adjusted to multilingual feature
  • Added display option for product description in shopping cart.
  • existing widget sets get appended to a translated page if the whole site tree gets translated
  • Silvercart has now its own forget password email template
  • SilvercartPagination uses Pagination method from dataobjectset which can be configured via SilvercartConfig
  • GroupView template can now be set by template call
  • added posibility to get a members purchased products and check whether a product was already purchased
  • search cloud widget can now be used as a content widget
  • added method to get a text a display how many products on how many pages are found in a product group
  • inherited WidgetSetSidebar and WidgetSetContent will now be loaded at the right time (after potential actions are called) and with the right method (when the real ManyManyComponents are loaded) => BUGFIXES
  • added a customer admin to provide enhanced customer filters and exports

Bugfixes

  • Address tabs get displayed again for SilvercartOrder
  • sort order of SilvercartOrderStatus adjusted to multilingual feature
  • SilvercartProduct::getTaxAmount has fallback for getting the default pricetype id no logged in user is present.
  • SilvercartProuctGroupPage::getProducts fetches products for the current locale only
  • Remove not working filter in SilvercartProductGroupPage getProducts
  • SilvercartConfig::Check() sent an error message that no country was activated if the activated country did not have a translation in the current locale; bypasssed DataObject:get_one()
  • added step title for default order confirmation
  • Sorting of SilvercartProduct can be configured via_config.php now
  • Search shows only products with live SilvercartProductGroupPage
  • Missing check for in init method would lead to crash on paping through the product list and adding images to a product.
  • email sender is now utf8 decoded
  • search function seperates search terms for long and short description now to get better search results
  • fixed caching behaviour of Silvercart login widget to get working error messages displayed
  • fixed salutation fallback
  • fixed escaping bug for searches
  • fixed margin of product widget
  • inherited WidgetSetSidebar and WidgetSetContent will now be loaded at the right time (after potential actions are called) and with the right method (when the real ManyManyComponents are loaded)

Minor changes

  • Ability to get short and long description without html tags
  • SilvercartXMLDataFormatter uses line break for every object now.
  • fixed some translation issues
  • email sender gets now converted via iconv to be platform independent
  • added default value 4 for displayedPaginationPages
  • added update script for new displayedPaginationPages property and changed silvercart update version to 4
  • outsourced SilvercartProductGroupPage::getFlatChildPagesIDsForPage() into SilvercartTools
  • Added fulltext indexes for Short- and LoginDescription
  • added contition to check whether an object is of type SilvercartProduct when trying to add an AddCartForm in a slider widget; added possibility to set a template base name for silder widgets
  • modified SEO tools
  • reduced image table of slidorion widget to images without product or payment relation
  • some minor css additions
  •  some css changes for tag clouds widget
  • Removed possibility to manage products from the SiteTree. Added link to product admin instead.
  • Added shortcut to widget set admin in the SiteTree view.

With some new via backend configurable templates SilverCart 1.3.1 is even easier to use now.

By the display of the product groups you have the option to filter your search. With our new optimized usability SilverCart version you automatically avoid many unnecessary mistakes.

Conclusion

All the new features now provided by this SilverCart release make SilverCart more easy and more comfortable to use. SilverCart provides now more configurable templates in the backend. That means you don't need to go right into the code for changing such simple things as e-mail templates.

And one more thing!

No, SilverCart 1.3.1 is not compatible with SilverStripe 3. We are currently working on SilverCart 2, which will be compatible with SilverStripe 3. Because of the amount of changes required, we'll have to publish a whole new version of SilverCart.

We have pretty much work for clients to do and we are also still developing new features for SilverCart 1.3. Since SilverStripe 3 is not as mature as we would like it to have as the foundation for an eCommerce website, we are holding back a bit.

Long story short...maybe we'll release a preview version that is compatible with SilverStripe 3 and features the most basic modules until the end of this year. If things go well, we have a stable version with some core modules in early (think march / april) 2013.

Image: © Ramon Kupper