Unfortunately you are right and these changes were not included int 4.3.5
Reason: as you know it took us almost half of the year to implement these changes, and there were a number of significant changes in SEO. We finished testing only in December, when 4.3.5 was already branched.
As you know SEO is one of the most critical functionality in live stores.
I also do not plan to include this in 4.3.6 as it should have only compatibility with PHP7, no functionality changes.
Right now I'm investigating opportunity to prepare updated SEO add-on as a separate package for 4.3.6. I will let you know.
P-Pharma, I apologize for the situation, I know that you were waiting for this feature for a long time and that we already promised it to be release in older versions. I will do my best to find a solution for you.
I really appreciate your words imac. We will wait for the release. Please keep me updated.
My upgrade failed after waiting a long time 40 minutes at what looked like one of the final stages. I eventually refreshed the browser but now when I go back in to the Upgrade Manager to try again it says no updates available.
I have never had an upgrade problem before and have made no other changes.
However for the use case of productID / itemID this is a valid use case. A period is used to denote important breaks / difference in structure like sub-domains, file extensions or entry ID's. In this specific use case it would make a lot of sense to use a period between entry name (product name) and entryID (SKU for product) because if the entryID is unique & eternal, then the entry name can change without broken links. If the webmaster changes the product name, the old links would still work.
For example: /productname.123 can be accessible as /123 and /whatever.123 at the same time. Because the entryID becomes the unique identifier. And that's exactly what a period is for.
Another benefit for this approach is that it separates keywords from the entryID for SEO purposes.
I believe the beta version of 4.3.6 is running on top of PHP 7 at their beta site.
Even older versions of cs-cart will run on PHP 7, but they will generate a lot of "deprecated" warnings in your error_log. 4.3.6 cleans up the use of deprecated functions like split() and some class initializations in the PHP 4 style of using the class name versus __construct as the constructor for the class.
We found 2 of our addons (out of about 10 V4 addons) that needed adjustments related to class constructors. New versions of those have been distributed.
So once V4.3.6 is released, you should be able to upgrade your site to PHP 7 and all should be well.
Of course, I can't speak for other addon developers and their addon compatibility with PHP 7.