it's 6 days already, still I don't see on upgrade center. last time was the same, but then suddenly upgraded after 8 or 10 days later. I don't know when will this time can happen the upgrade.
seems like I am not alone to have this kind of problem on this forums.
it's 6 days already, still I don't see on upgrade center. last time was the same, but then suddenly upgraded after 8 or 10 days later. I don't know when will this time can happen the upgrade.
seems like I am not alone to have this kind of problem on this forums.
The original post by the thread-starter said it could take up to 2-3 weeks for the update to show up in your upgrade center. Mine has not shown up yet either. A few posts ago someone said they pulled the update because of a problem that needed fixed. If you absolutely have to have the update right away, maybe contact Helpdesk and see if they can prioritize your store some way.
Hi, cigarhut,As long as you have the Buy Together add-on installed, all of your combinations will be safe in your database. If you reactivate the old add-on they will appear again. Just do not delete the old add-on. The old and the new add-on can not work together so you have to disable one of the add-ons when the other one is working.We do not have a special tool to convert combinations into product bundles because usually this is the thing you do just once. Our Customer Care specialists will be happy to help you move your combinations to the new add-on so that you won't have to spend your time and resources on it. If you'd like that please contact our team via Help Desk.
sadly I find that the layout and functionality of the Product Bundles is horrible and will continue with the "Buy together" for the time being
sadly I find that the layout and functionality of the Product Bundles is horrible and will continue with the "Buy together" for the time being
Sorry to hear that. Could you please be more specific on what you've found "horrible" about the layout and functionality? This way we might be able to address it in one of the future versions.
Vendor when creating the shipping method can tick Use for all new vendors:. I believe this should be hiden for vendors.
Vendor when creating the shipping method can tick Use for all new vendors:. I believe this should be hiden for vendors.
Thank you for letting us know. You are correct, and we'll fix this issue in a future version.
Sorry to hear that. Could you please be more specific on what you've found "horrible" about the layout and functionality? This way we might be able to address it in one of the future versions.
the layout of the product bundle is poorly designed, instead of looking anything like a product card or the previous "buy together" it now takes up so much room and requires scrolling down to see price and add to cart buttons. Also I found the bundles did NOT appear on the promotions page unless the product bundle was left active and the add on was disabled.
IMHO, it is buggy, poorly designed and pretty much unusable as is on CS-Cart Ultimate with Unitheme2
the layout of the product bundle is poorly designed, instead of looking anything like a product card or the previous "buy together" it now takes up so much room and requires scrolling down to see price and add to cart buttons. Also I found the bundles did NOT appear on the promotions page unless the product bundle was left active and the add on was disabled.
IMHO, it is buggy, poorly designed and pretty much unusable as is on CS-Cart Ultimate with Unitheme2
Haha, I've just discovered that everything is made via promotions mechanism which are hidden in promotions.manage. *** In this sentence I would make a joke about poor architecture but I'm afraid to get banned *** Let me explain why the mechanism is ridiculous :
Let's say that I sell men's cloths (jackets, trousers, shoes, shirts). I want to create a product bundle with a complete look. Below are the products and their variations:
a) jacket - 6 sizes/3 colors
b) trousers - 6 sizes/3 colors
c) shoes - 6 sizes/3 colors
d) shirts - 6 sizes (height)/6 collar sizes/3 colors
Guess what will do cs-cart under the hood when you create a product bundle for the above products... Ready for some cool magic? Tadam!!! Cs-cart will create single promotion foreach of the possible combination! Awesome! Let's do some math: 6 * 3 *6 * 3 * 6 * 3 * 6 * 6 * 3 = 629 856 different combinations! :-)
After each add to cart event the system will check if cart content meets the requirements of any of 629 856 promotions that were created! ;-)
I know that my example is extreme but I've just tested it on my dev site where I wanted to create a product bundle for 2 products:
Product A - 8 fabric colors/2 frame colors
Product B - 25 fabric colors/2 frame colors
And it produced 800 new promotions. Just for a single product bundle!!!
I will also mention, that the UX is terrible. If you change the variation (e.g. choose different color) then the thumbnails doesn't update so the customer doesn't know what kind of bundle he's adding to cart.
If you were compalining about the issues with speed and performance of cs-cart than just be aware of what kind of architecture cs-cart is proposing.
@Ikoshkin, @Imac - while there were consultations about product variations design I was rising concerncs about buy together and product bundles. After long time you acknowledged the issues (my first ticket about problems was submitted almost 2 years ago). Now you're releasing this.
I'm dissapointed and shocked.
I have just installed the new Bundles add-onn and it caused my site to crash with memory errors, I was only able to get it back online by de-activating then uninstalling the bundles add-on.
When it did work partially before crashing everything.
I have a vendor with 3 types of T-Shirts each has 4 colors and 8 sizes.
The colors and types are different products, the sizes are variations.
That gives 12 products.
With the bundles add-on I can not creat a bundle where it you choose any 2 of the 12 products you get a discount.
The variations part look to be good.
But you can not have a group where any 2 gives a discount.
Haha, I've just discovered that everything is made via promotions mechanism which are hidden in promotions.manage. *** In this sentence I would make a joke about poor architecture but I'm afraid to get banned *** Let me explain why the mechanism is ridiculous :
Let's say that I sell men's cloths (jackets, trousers, shoes, shirts). I want to create a product bundle with a complete look. Below are the products and their variations:
a) jacket - 6 sizes/3 colors
B) trousers - 6 sizes/3 colors
c) shoes - 6 sizes/3 colors
d) shirts - 6 sizes (height)/6 collar sizes/3 colors
Guess what will do cs-cart under the hood when you create a product bundle for the above products... Ready for some cool magic? Tadam!!! Cs-cart will create single promotion foreach of the possible combination! Awesome! Let's do some math: 6 * 3 *6 * 3 * 6 * 3 * 6 * 6 * 3 = 629 856 different combinations! :-)
After each add to cart event the system will check if cart content meets the requirements of any of 629 856 promotions that were created! ;-)
I know that my example is extreme but I've just tested it on my dev site where I wanted to create a product bundle for 2 products:
Product A - 8 fabric colors/2 frame colors
Product B - 25 fabric colors/2 frame colors
And it produced 800 new promotions. Just for a single product bundle!!!
I will also mention, that the UX is terrible. If you change the variation (e.g. choose different color) then the thumbnails doesn't update so the customer doesn't know what kind of bundle he's adding to cart.
If you were compalining about the issues with speed and performance of cs-cart than just be aware of what kind of architecture cs-cart is proposing.
@Ikoshkin, @Imac - while there were consultations about product variations design I was rising concerncs about buy together and product bundles. After long time you acknowledged the issues (my first ticket about problems was submitted almost 2 years ago). Now you're releasing this.
I'm dissapointed and shocked.
I am just annoyed they still didn't implement them as separate products.
Just looked at some of the other product bundles add-ons, doesn't this look *very* familiar? https://marketplace.cs-cart.com/product-bundles.html
Just looked at some of the other product bundles add-ons, doesn't this look *very* familiar? https://marketplace.cs-cart.com/product-bundles.html
discontinued simtechdev addons are incorporated in to cs-cart as fresh stuff, not the first time now :D
I am just annoyed they still didn't implement them as separate products.
Exactly, they should do this as different product type like other solutions have it implemented.
Btw, I've just checked the speed improvements on unitheme and nothing has changed for me ragarding mobile performance.
To sum this up:
1) Product bundles are not usable and it's just an implementation of the simtchedev addon which doesn't sell well.
2) Speed improvements are just the things that were already implemented in othere themes and addons.
3) Tilda integration was available as an addon on cs-cart marketplace and anyone who wanted could have this functionality.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from my perspective it looks like cs-cart is borrowing ways to patch cs-cart from other developers because they need updates in order to sell upgrade licenses. I don't see any added value in recent upgrades, there are no information about cs-cart v5 and I can't see any bold decisions to finally fix the problems and change cs-cart architecture.
Moreover, cs-cart officials like @imac, @ikoshkin don't take part in this discussion and they don't give us any reasons to believe that they are working on fixing the core problems of cs-cart platform.
I have just installed the new Bundles add-onn and it caused my site to crash with memory errors, I was only able to get it back online by de-activating then uninstalling the bundles add-on.
If you'd like to use the new Product Bundles add-on, but experiencing any issues with the add-on or its performance, please let us know via Help Desk. Our Customer Care specialists will be able to investigate it further and in your store; if there is a bug on our end, we'll address it.
P.S. We are planning some improvements to product bundles in future versions (especially in regard to how they look on the storefront).
Good
But this version has some bugs in Settings: Checkout, Default Customer Location.
Does not work and the default state is mandatory...
Thanks for letting us know! I see that you have already submitted a bug report in the bug tracker. Our specialists will look into it there. If a problem is urgent, then https://helpdesk.cs-cart.comwill be a faster channel.
I am just annoyed they still didn't implement them as separate products.
While looking into "Buy together", we realized that those combinations are in fact promotions. A "bundle" can be a single product (i.e. a gaming console with a game, which come together as one SKU and don't need any add-ons to work in CS-Cart) or several separate products that are cheaper together (a promotion). Hence the implementation as promotions.
Just looked at some of the other product bundles add-ons, doesn't this look *very* familiar? https://marketplace.cs-cart.com/product-bundles.html
Well, it's the first time I've seen that add-on. Just by a quick glance, there're some obvious differences (i.e., our bunldes are presented in the cart as separate products). Any other coincidences in the interface (such as bundle creation, that does look similar) just mean that we just came to similar decisions independently. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Btw, I've just checked the speed improvements on unitheme and nothing has changed for me ragarding mobile performance.
Not all of our clients use UniTheme. I'm sure that AlexBranding did their best for Google PageSpeed on their end. So did we on the CS-Cart back end and front end. With two caveats:
- CS-Cart 4 has to retain backward compatibility, for ease of moving between versions (that's something A LOT of customers and add-on/theme developers asked for);
- upgrades have to be released regularly, with at least two "minor" upgrades like 4.14.1 and 4.13.1 per year (if it gets slower, customers get unhappy about the pace, and even announcing the changes gets complicated for us).
I don't know how many of those improvements coincide with the things already in UniTheme (or whether UniTheme lacks any improvements that we made). What I do know is that all the changes we considered were analyzed independently, based on backward compatibility, the scope, and the amount of PageSpeed points they yielded (probably other factors as well).
You previously asked for the list of optimizations that we considered but didn't include. I would've provided it here, but with all the things and projects going on, we probably won't have the time to do that at the forum.
To sum this up
1) Product bundles are not usable and it's just an implementation of the simtchedev addon which doesn't sell well.
2) Speed improvements are just the things that were already implemented in othere themes and addons.
3) Tilda integration was available as an addon on cs-cart marketplace and anyone who wanted could have this functionality.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from my perspective it looks like cs-cart is borrowing ways to patch cs-cart from other developers because they need updates in order to sell upgrade licenses. I don't see any added value in recent upgrades.
1. That got disproven above. The screenshot of the cart page from the Simtech Development add-on should be proof enough that these add-ons are not the same. The new bundles will be receiving improvements, which we'll announce as they are developed. Most likely, that will be done in the blog, in the release announcement for 4.14.2.
2. This part is up for debate. I honestly can't say which of PageSpeed improvements from CS-Cart other add-ons and themes had, have, or don't have. Simply because that's not something we compared or analyzed. One of our clients actually reported improvements, but it could be because that client also switched to WebP images (which are now supported as well, and which Google endorses).
3. Yes, there were (and still are) at least three Tilda integrations in out Marketplace. Some of them may work differently, and may offer more or less functionality in some areas (again, I haven't had a chance to look into them in detail). But most of those add-ons have a considerable price tag, and we found the ability to easily create beautiful landing pages (and include products from your online store into them) a feature that's important enough to have in CS-Cart by default in some capacity. Especially since we use it ourselves sometimes.
So, the "borrowing ways from other developers" part is not correct at least.
That doesn't change the fact that 4.14.1 lacks the changes that you found useful for your business—which is unfortunate, because your prior requests were among the reasons why product bundles were considered for 4.14.1 and were included in the final release. All we can do is take note of all the feedback we get, prioritize it, and keep improving the product.
There are no information about cs-cart v5 and I can't see any bold decisions to finally fix the problems and change cs-cart architecture.
Moreover, cs-cart officials like @imac, @ikoshkin don't take part in this discussion and they don't give us any reasons to believe that they are working on fixing the core problems of cs-cart platform.
The reason why we don't take part in this discussion are pretty simple (and has something in common with why we haven't posted anything about CS-Cart 5 and Google PageSpeed improvements back when you asked for an update).
Putting together this answer alone easily took me a couple of hours (with all the fact checking, etc.). And the forum has plenty of discussions. That's why our Help Desk is the only place where we can guarantee a prompt reply from the company's representative right now. The entire Customer Care department is basically dedicated to that (and to helping CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor owners any way they can).
The forum is a good source of information though, and myself and Ilya are reading it quite frequently (much more than we can write here). That's one of the reasons why Multi-Vendor 4.14.2 will most likely have the "Add to cart" button for common products, and bundles will look better on the storefront.
For example, I usuall read everything and take note, and try to reply in the following cases:
- when there is a question I can answer quickly (i.e. see a bug that can be quickly reproduced);
- when there are reports of a problem that will most likely require contacting Customer Care and letting them look into it directly in the store;
- when a discussion goes out of hand due to speculations (like the idea of us using other devs' work) or forum rules getting broken.
It is simply a much more efficient approach to improve the product instead of spending time on assurances at the forum. Likewise, it is much more efficient to make one announcement with details about CS-Cart 5 for everyone to see when the time is right, instead of trying to jump the gun and disprove every single comment that we're not working on it. As I metioned before, we are (the plan is to bring it up in the end-of-the year video).
P.S. To prevent the discussion getting out of hand again during the weekend, I'm locking this topic until Monday, December 20th.
P.P.S. Topic unlocked. I might not be able to provide replies as lengthy here in the future.
If you'd like to use the new Product Bundles add-on, but experiencing any issues with the add-on or its performance, please let us know via Help Desk. Our Customer Care specialists will be able to investigate it further and in your store; if there is a bug on our end, we'll address it.
P.S. We are planning some improvements to product bundles in future versions (especially in regard to how they look on the storefront).
Thanks for letting us know! I see that you have already submitted a bug report in the bug tracker. Our specialists will look into it there. If a problem is urgent, then https://helpdesk.cs-cart.comwill be a faster channel.
Ticket Number: #103348295.
There is a bug with UI and I'm told it will be fixed within 45 days.
The biggest problem is with architecture though. I've gave an example of number of promotions that are being generated for a single product set. I expect someone to comment on the technical aspects from the performance perspective.
Right now as far as I understand, each time a product is added to cart the system iterates through possibly hundreds of thousands of promotions. Correct me if I'm wrong.
While looking into "Buy together", we realized that those combinations are in fact promotions. A "bundle" can be a single product (i.e. a gaming console with a game, which come together as one SKU and don't need any add-ons to work in CS-Cart) or several separate products that are cheaper together (a promotion). Hence the implementation as promotions.
I tend to disagree.
In ticket number #102613842 from Apr 8, 2020 I gave you and example of the product that should have separate product page.
I've tried to find a major e-commerce engine that doesn't have the implementation of product type. I can give you examples of your competitors with grouped product types in private message in order not to violate forum rules.
I know that not all of cs-cart users need it but it would be nice if you could give the choice to store owners if they want the product bundle to appear on the category page (e.g. because it's needed that the bundle is seo optimized and searchable, available in product data feeds etc.) as a separate product or as a promotion.
Well, it's the first time I've seen that add-on. Just by a quick glance, there're some obvious differences (i.e., our bunldes are presented in the cart as separate products). Any other coincidences in the interface (such as bundle creation, that does look similar) just mean that we just came to similar decisions independently. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah, e.g. the noticeable difference is that product bundles are visually distinct in the checkout. In my opinion simtechdev implementation is much better.
Still, using promotions mechanism in product bundles is weird idea for me. In my opinion the instructions on how to calculate bundle price should be calculated on the fly rather than stored in the database in potentially hundreds of thousands of records.
Not all of our clients use UniTheme. I'm sure that AlexBranding did their best for Google PageSpeed on their end. So did we on the CS-Cart back end and front end. With two caveats:
- CS-Cart 4 has to retain backward compatibility, for ease of moving between versions (that's something A LOT of customers and add-on/theme developers asked for);
- upgrades have to be released regularly, with at least two "minor" upgrades like 4.14.1 and 4.13.1 per year (if it gets slower, customers get unhappy about the pace, and even announcing the changes gets complicated for us).
I don't know how many of those improvements coincide with the things already in UniTheme (or whether UniTheme lacks any improvements that we made). What I do know is that all the changes we considered were analyzed independently, based on backward compatibility, the scope, and the amount of PageSpeed points they yielded (probably other factors as well).
I'm not expecting that you will know all available addons on the marketplace and how they are working. In this case though cs-cart Russian demo is using unitheme as default theme (https://demo.cs-cart.ru/).
From my perspective if you were working on improving the page speed and again came to the same conclusions as alexbranding what can be implemented and you didn't make any further improvements than alexbranding than the problem lies within cs-cart architecture.
Only cs-cart team can change the core so it's your responsibility to make faster load times possible. I think that alexbranding is pushing hard to increase page speed of their solutions but they encounter limitations from the cs-cart platform. Big dom, loading not needed js and css, weird cache behavior.
My store was using webp addon from alexbranding and I didn't notice any performance gains on pagespeed after upgrading to new cs-cart version.. Again, you can check the performance of unitheme on demo.cs-cart.ru (https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdemo.cs-cart.ru%2Fstores%2F5d38bf57f632975a%2F). 37/100 point on mobile on demo.cs-cart.ru and bragging about speed improvements in the release notes is a little bit funny for me.
You previously asked for the list of optimizations that we considered but didn't include. I would've provided it here, but with all the things and projects going on, we probably won't have the time to do that at the forum.
I still take the position that the list with possible speed improvements should be published.
You probably invested much more time in making the discoveries about possible speed improvements and some had to take the notes.
I don't expect it to be beautiful, just point me in the right direction what I can do to achieve better scores (even at the cost of backward compatibility).
The approach of having notes but not showing them up is absurd to me.
Btw, at home I have an invisible dog but unfortunately I cannot show it to you from obvious reasons - I know it seems absurd but that's just the way it is! I hope you get the irony ;-)
It is simply a much more efficient approach to improve the product instead of spending time on assurances at the forum. Likewise, it is much more efficient to make one announcement with details about CS-Cart 5 for everyone to see when the time is right, instead of trying to jump the gun and disprove every single comment that we're not working on it. As I metioned before, we are (the plan is to bring it up in the end-of-the year video).
No one is asking you to spend time on assurances.
Simple roadmap with information on what you're currently working on would suffice. Right now the level of my frustration is really high. As a store owner I don't know if you will address the issues which are crucial for my business and in what time frame.
Just to remind you I wrote about the buy together problems in helpdesk Apr 8, 2020 and before that we were discussing it on the forum when the product variations were discussed (You assured me that I should not worry about possible issues with buy together).
I know that software development is hard but believe me that running e-commerce store is also hard. I don't want to invest my time on the platform which is not being able to adapt to market changes fast enough to allow me compete and scale my business.
I can't wait for you to announce the cs-cart v5 and share the technical details on the technology stack and architecture foundations. I hope that I will not get disappointed.
We are wait Cs-cart v5 details and preview video !
Vendor when creating the shipping method can tick Use for all new vendors:. I believe this should be hiden for vendors.
Hi memel,
Displaying the сheckbox Use for all new vendors: for the vendors is fixed in the 4.14.2 release.
To fix you can use the patch:
https://gist.github.com/ichaykin/a5adecf3ae575edce83b8f0627e08bde
Thank you, but this is not a detailed preview video. I'm waiting for the detailed preview video that @ikoshkin mentioned.