Some Add-ons to Be Excluded from CS-Cart 4.1.1

[quote name='ALEXsei_' timestamp='1383091561' post='170595']

cs-cart gradually getting rid of the things that attract new and novice users. gets rid of what influences the buying decision. First it was the templates are now addons.

[/quote]

Hello,



New themes are coming. Also, with our Theme Editor, you can customize your storefront way easier than it was in the times when CS-Cart shipped with lots of templates (like 2.x.x era).



We are excluding just some add-ons, not all of them.

  • removed this line to prevent confusion -



    About the upgrade to 4.11, I really hope this won't break add-ons we are having build for 4.0x again, seeing that you're dumping the add-on in this version. Please confirm add-ons will continue to work as we were promised they would in the entire 4 branch?

Flow: Its not the Gift certificates that is going, its the Gift registry.

[quote name='Onkel_Sid' timestamp='1383209075' post='170711']

Flow: Its not the Gift certificates that is going, its the Gift registry.

[/quote]



Ah ok - I thought so but then someone posted about the gift certificates going so I thought maybe they were connected (we do not use the gift registry)… all good then.

I personally think that this is a good move. CS-Cart can't innovate and keep everything in their software.

[quote name=‘kmolchanov’ timestamp=‘1383203996’ post=‘170706’]

Hello,



New themes are coming. Also, with our Theme Editor, you can customize your storefront way easier than it was in the times when CS-Cart shipped with lots of templates (like 2.x.x era).



We are excluding just some add-ons, not all of them.

[/quote]



Hi



v2 was recently :) started with v1 and still on 2.1.4 :)



I remember well what influenced my choice. Some functions are now on the list, sorry. I’m just stating.



PS. IMHO may make sense to leave the opportunity to buy the stable version of the previous series? for example 2.2.5, with moving forward.

[quote name='Onkel_Sid' timestamp='1383209075' post='170711']

Flow: Its not the Gift certificates that is going, its the Gift registry.

[/quote]



Ah, better, I made this mistake too. Sorry for my previous post!


[quote name='Flow' timestamp='1383207648' post='170709']

About the upgrade to 4.11, I really hope this won't break add-ons we are having build for 4.0x again, seeing that you're dumping the add-on in this version. Please confirm add-ons will continue to work as we were promised they would in the entire 4 branch?

[/quote]



I'm very curious too…

I'm happy for myself personally - All addons with so little market capitalization on the CS-Cart userbase and yet the most error prone.

Live and let die

Product configurator was one of the main reason to shift to cs-cart.

Now it will be the main reason to shift to other cart .

[quote name=‘dustundag’ timestamp=‘1384606940’ post=‘171733’]

Product configurator was one of the main reason to shift to cs-cart.

Now it will be the main reason to shift to other cart .

[/quote]



Yep, I told my client about the product configurator bad news and her response was “time to look for another cart”



I also got a notice from cs-cart returning my 3 Ideas votes on the product configurator. Interestingly it had 250 votes, which made it in the top 7 suggestions in the Ideas forum. Still they blew it off :(

Is there anyway to get the refund or resale ? I have paid two seperate cs-cart multisite for the total of 10 websites.

But one thing fore sure I am not going to use cs-cart any more.

It is also ironic "How can we improve Cs-Cart " = "Just please give us some ideas and we exclude them from add-on ".

Any more excellent ideas?

I hope cs-cart can think over the idea of abandoning the product configurator addon. There are quite some people are using and relying on this addon.

[quote name='cscartrocks' timestamp='1384650235' post='171759']

I hope cs-cart can think over the idea of abandoning the product configurator addon. There are quite some people are using and relying on this addon.

[/quote]

Shame if it does go, as at the moment it is one way that people are getting round some of the shortfalls of the product options and combinations.



John

Maybe this is an opportunity for a developer to create an addon for the shortfalls of the product option/combination and the configuration function. I asked cs-cart support about the configurator in 2007 and this is the response from 2008


Product configurator functionality has not been changed since that
time.[August 2007] We plan to release a major upgrade of CS-Cart in 4-6 months and
probably(but not sure) we will update configurator with these changes in this version [1.3.6].




So far no one has indicated an interested in taking over the configurator function.

“Buy together” and the “configurator” should probably have been evolved as a single combined add on. Having short sighted and closed ears for the user voice, developers instead concentrate on other list of add ons or new features.

i would not be suprised if they abondone the “buy together” add on in the near feature and in replacement create more templates instead !

If you've ever tried to decypher the code in the product configurator, you would understand why probably no one is willing to touch it. Would be easier to get a real set of requirements and start from scratch.



My bet is that this was done as a custom development project for a single customer and was just put into the cart without any thought to general usefulness or utility. Back in the V1/V2 period, this was common practice to build out a marketing feature list. This practice stopped during V2 (which is a good thing).



What “bundle” addon?

[quote name='tbirnseth' timestamp='1384755893' post='171811']

If you've ever tried to decypher the code in the product configurator, you would understand why probably no one is willing to touch it. Would be easier to get a real set of requirements and start from scratch.



My bet is that this was done as a custom development project for a single customer and was just put into the cart without any thought to general usefulness or utility. Back in the V1/V2 period, this was common practice to build out a marketing feature list. This practice stopped during V2 (which is a good thing).



What “bundle” addon?

[/quote]

Sorry I have meant “Buy Together”

In my back-end order management system, we tried to support “product kits”. I use the furniture paradigm to describe it. I.e. a Dining Set product that provides a table (with optional leaf), 4 chairs (with optional upholstery and finish options). The complexity is taking a single product like a chair that is setup to have lets say 2 upholstery options (upholstery 1 and upholstery 2) and 2 finish options (finish 1 and finish 2).



Easy to setup for a “chair” product. But when this is part of a “kit”, how much does each option impact the "kit"price/weight? Also, the option needs to be selectable once for all chairs versus once for each chair. Nobody wants a simple discount structure applied to a “kit” so it gets very complex, very fast.



Needs to also be able to add a chair to the kit (at appropriate pricing and ensure that the chair is in stock with those options) as well as leafs to the table. But should that added chair be priced the same as 1/4th the charis in the 4 chair set? Or would it be priced differently?



And that's just furniture. jewelry, pharmaceutical and other “mixture” products have a whole different set of issues.



Hence the complexity is high no matter what you do; which equates to a lot of developer hours of which most people are not willing to pay for.



My guess is that when cs-cart looked at how many people use the configurator as a buying decision go/nogo point, they found it to be less than the investment required to make the feature useable/maintainable and hence put it into the public domain for people to use and/or for a developer to pick up support for. Purely a business decision.



Companies obsolete products/features all the time that turn out to be less profitable or more expensive than originally intended. You can't even buy a Coke in the US that has sugar in it instead of HFCS. But people still tend to buy Coke. If you want sugar in your Coke, you'll have to buy a Mexican import at about $2.50/bottle. You can continue to use the one that exists in V4.0.3 and hopefully it will work on V4.1.0. If not, you'll be stuck at V4.0.3.

That is what i meant to be. Buy together is some sort of a “bundle product” with options.

However due to the fact that cs-cart product options not being a product like Magento, cs-cart

prefered to exclude the product configurator rather than developing with Buy Together

However Magento in the past did missed cs cart product configurator feature conditional relations

product to product . It is also ironic to keep the “buy together” and the existing option structure and wait

for developers to develop the product configurator. May be cs cart is the wrong boat for more complicated products with the existing options database structure! Other alternative is creation of hidden products

as options for more complicated product. But then this hidden product should have been seen as options

of a parent product which is not currently supported by cs-cart current version.

[quote name='dustundag' timestamp='1384830759' post='171900']

That is what i meant to be. Buy together is some sort of a “bundle product” with options.

However due to the fact that cs-cart product options not being a product like Magento, cs-cart

prefered to exclude the product configurator rather than developing with Buy Together

[/quote]



Hi dustundag,



Could you confirm, if you have seen my post about solution that Magento uses and suggestion that maybe it should be the same way in cs-cart? I wrote it today in the night at about 1 am at it seems that it has been deleted by the admin ?