[wartornskull]

wartonskull > your reply > Thanks - should be fine I know but have had issues with AuthType Basic protected sub-directories conflicting with the SEO/SEF re-writing. Had to perform workaround to get it to work.

Yeah I had the same issue the other day when setting up a test store, if you disable the htaccess protection temporarily while you enable the SEO addon then re-enable the protection everything should work fine, at least it did for me. Just wouldn't enable the addon with the protection active.

[El Nucli]

Dear tbirnseth,

Indeed, CS-Cart 4 has some significant core changes compared to CS-Cart 3.0.x. This is why we called it 4 instead of 3.1.1.

We assure you that all the core changes in CS-Cart 4 are necessary for the successful evolution of the software. This is not some kind of an experiment—this is what we, as developers, have to do in order to keep CS-Cart in pace with time. Modern technologies change quickly—and so should modern software.

Extending functionality without making corresponding core modifications will lead to lower stability, worse maintainability, and slow down the development in the long run. Also, supporting legacy code is pain for both our developer team and 3rd party developers.

Your comments are very important for us; listening to user feedback is crucial for a successful product. We thank you very much for sharing your thoughts with us, and we hope for your understanding.

Imac,

In my humble opinion, I would highly recommend you to listen the comments of users like Tbirnseth, Flow, Darius (amongst others) that provide people like me with tons of high quality posts in the forums. I'm sure you can appreciate the vast amount of communication to your help desk that people like them save you every day. The announce of tbirnseth in the direction of looking for another vendor (and maybe the silent decision of others in the same direction), is a serious damage for the community and for the Cs-cart product itself.

For Cs-cart as a business, it makes sense to provide the world not only with an affordable, modern and high-quality e-commerce solution, but also to provide an "environment" where professionals can develop addons, templates, custom work and provide support to end-user and store owners. Being disruptive in such environment discourages the adoption of cs-cart as a long term solution. Stabilty in the methods and technologies used allow for such type of partners to invest in the Cs-cart "environment" providing end-user with a better solution, extending the reputation of Cs-cart as a sound decision for the online activity of our customers.

Please, consider it.

[imac]

Hello guys,


Beta2 was released today, you can download it here:

• CS-Cart 4 Beta2 Ultimate Edition
• CS-Cart 4 Beta2 Multi-Vendor Edition

Links to the packages in the first post were updated either.

[imac]

Guys, does anyone use DHL as a realtime shipping service?
Can you check it in 4.0.1 Beta?

[Triplets]

iMac, do you plan on adding any new eccomerce features before the final release? Version 4 seems lacking in new shopping cart features. Some thoughts: product configurator needs major overhaul, buy together needs major overhaul, ability to add several products to cart from one page, product calendar option, product date option, etc.

New shiny fast release with no new real cart functionality doesn't help my clients or entice them to upgrade.

David

[tbirnseth]

As I've looked at V4, it appears the majority of change has been to the structure of the file layout and conformance to a coding standard. I see very little change that actually benefits anyone other than cs-cart development. Coding standards come an go and are "helpfult" in some areas. However, to require all vendors to rewrite everything to comply with a new coding standard is simply ridiculous. If you were going to do this right, you should have put everything an addon needs to run, hook itself or provide services under the addons directory. This includes its templates, php code, controllers, classes, init/func.php, etc. Then everything is in one tree and can be distributed/removed easily. But now templates are scattered all over the place. I think you've created more of a mess than an improvement.

If you want to go from "snake" to "camelBack" naming for class methods, that's fine. But you can easily provide compatibility for the old names within the classes. There was NO need to break everything. It is lazy engineering to simply rewrite and tell others to comply.

Why not preserve compatibility for the little things that really help? You could easily have an include file that did things like
define("DIR_ADDONS', Registry::get('config.dir.addons')) to provide compatibility without damaging your precious standards (though I note that many of the V2 changes were along the same lines). You did the same thing when you changed fn_set_notification() in the first releases of V2.1. The same goes for providing compatibility functions. In V3, you removed or moved a number of template hooks. Unfortunately, these don't get detected until the functionality disappears. Same with changing names and parameters of php hooks. What's the point of a hook if it's going to change underneath you? If you change the parameters that are passed then you've destroyed the point of using a hook in the first place.

Standards are nice and I can certainly see where providing an API "could" get some benefit from namespaces. But it would be a lot easier on the rest of us if you'd simply publish the reserved names and move on. Auto-loading of classes is a nice feature but it certainly isn't required (since it takes one line of code to do so).

Many times simplicity, compatibility and consistency are the best standards one can conform to. But what do I know? The focus of all developers has now moved away from the main benefit of V4 which was to provide an API to hours and hours of "make work" to get their software to run in the new environment.

But obviously my time is not your concern. And your product is my choice. I'll let you decide on what's important to you.

Edit: P.S. I hope V2.2.5 lives forever. It is by far the best product you've produced.

Edited by tbirnseth, 30 April 2013 - 06:44 PM.

[parodius420]

I run a small store. It would cost me more to migrate everything over to v4 from v3, get all the addons fixed, theme fixed, etc, than I have actually made/sold off my site to date. If I had to do this, I would probably just move to a different ecommerce solution.

[jhagg]

Product cost/COGS needs to be added as core functionality, needing to see how much you profit on an invoice/sale/product should be core functionality in this next gen version, not a third party add on.

[Flow]

Ruben Gomez, the founder of Bidsketch said it very well:
Customers don't care about product features or usability if a product fails to solve their problem. It's not about the features you want your product to have, it's about the problems that customers need to solve. Solve their problem better than anyone else and you'll end up with a product your customers can't live without.

Just an example:
Per week, we get at least 3 mails and 2 calls from customers telling us their coupon code is not working. The problem is usually that they copied and pasted an extra space with the coupon code. cs-cart should recognize this and still accept the code. These little things are problems that are very annoying for us shop owners and should be solved, one by one. Instead of giving us the: this is standard behaviour line. If you do this, solve these problems, you will create loyal, happy customers who will promote your product - for free! I know - I did it all the time on many fora and blogs.

At the moment, you are creating problems for your existing customers instead of fixing them, because your new versions constantly ruin all the work we put in our shops - from templates to add-ons to custom code.
I just spend > $2000,- development money and a LOT of my own time in getting version 3 ultimate to run well for us - only to find out that, ridiculously but true, storefronts can't have their own status mails, which rendered version 3 ultimate completely useless to us and many other shopowners - I happen to know a couple that are in the same situation.

So as it happens I'm still running 2.25. Now version 4 is out (not even a year later) and hooray - we can start all over again and I wonder if I will find things again that make it impossible for us to move over. Not even talking about the money we will need to spend to get out 2 shops into version.

I would love to hear your response. Also to Tony's comment.

As for now - we will continue to run 2.25 and see what happens when version 4 final has been released and draw our conclusions. We NEED the api so if cs-cart 4 is worth it will do all the work necessary, again, to make our add-on compatible.
If it's bad like ultimate 3, I'm afraid we will have to look at other solutions for our own shops as well as our webdesign-customers.

I would love to hear cs-carts response to my post as well as Tony's post.

[Onkel_Sid]

Product cost/COGS needs to be added as core functionality, needing to see how much you profit on an invoice/sale/product should be core functionality in this next gen version, not a third party add on.

Second that. This is included in just about every shopping cart out there, including: Magento, BigCommerce, Prestashop, Opencart etc.

http://cscart.uservo...9646-cost-price

[SpyreDigital]

When I first discovered that Ultimate edition (v3) didn't allow for separate Order Statuses between storefronts, I was stunned. Same with that fact that categories and products cannot be shared between multiple storefronts with a simple checkbox.
Now v4 is on the way and it STILL doesn't have this basic, logical functionality??

I don't think CS-Cart are really listening to the users.

[dennis]

Hello CS-Cart,

Running a big store with CS-Cart having some serious problems. I see a lot of complains from other users. Besides the power of all new features will bring I'm seriously worried. After money spending and conflicting upgrades I'm a tired CS-Cart holder.

My money blender!
From CS-Cart 1.3.6 to CS-Cart 2.04.
Then, it moved to CS-Cart 2.10
Then, it goes from 2.225 to CS-Cart 3
And within a small period of time to CS-Cart 4

Each time I have to set over my design, my_changes mods and addons.

You can't deny
If you deny the upgrades, you don't have a bright look into the future. Some guys here keep hanging in the CS-Cart 2.24 edition, but on the go you should have to upgrade. E-commerce keeps changing, you change, or hang...

What is so frustrating
The brilliance of cs-cart "Amazing e-commerce platform with 100% open source code."
Is CS-Cart so cheap and easy as it seems to be? NO way! If you think you are ready, you can start over new!
If you drive a serious business, you have a serious problem!

Many users have the same feelings! It disappoints me, however, I'm a freaky CS-Cart Junky.
CS-Cart, I hope you will invest more in providing better features or ways to keep your addons/design/mods steady!

I installed CS-Cart 4RC1 on my server and will do this for RC2 also . My first impression is great. But how long do you support?

My ideas for improvement
1. Add upgrading support for custom apps based on yearly fee.
2. Add upgrading support for custom integrations (take the cares away from the entrepreneurs)
3. Make a cleaner app structure (separately done in v4)
4. Create an app-marketplace!
5. Create more manuals, tutorials for building apps (please invest in it!)
6. Improve the upgrade manager (set hints by new code in comparing code functionality)
7. Help the active CS-Cart entrepreneurs to assist by upgrades (like the store import tool)

This critical note is my feedback. I hope it is welcome.

[jegesmaci]

I am a CS-Cart user for some time now. I am very happy with CS-Cart and happy that they are investing in updates and upgrading their software.

I also work in the software industry as a software product manager. I can understand how hard it is to do everything customers are asking.

I agree with dennis ideas for improvement. I have felt for the longest time that if the app structure was handled better that cs-cart would be unstoppable. Bigcommerce invested in their partner/app/marketplace strategy heavily and it is paying off. Everywhere I go online I see other applications that help ecommerce store owners. When you view compatible stores, you see Bigcommerce.

Keep moving forward CS-Cart. I know that many things that you needed to do in version 4 are preparing you for the future.

Thanks for everything!

Adam

[MichielTG]

Unbelievable how fast you made this shopping cart software! Now I will definitely upgrade my update subscription!

[Flow]

When I first discovered that Ultimate edition (v3) didn't allow for separate Order Statuses between storefronts, I was stunned. Same with that fact that categories and products cannot be shared between multiple storefronts with a simple checkbox.
Now v4 is on the way and it STILL doesn't have this basic, logical functionality??

I don't think CS-Cart are really listening to the users.

Are you saying this hasn't been fixed in version 4 (the individual status updates)? Please tell me it ain't so.

[imac]

Are you saying this hasn't been fixed in version 4 (the individual status updates)? Please tell me it ain't so.

Dear Flow and SpyreDigital,

There is an ability to set different header/subject of a status for each storefront in v4

[+] Statuses: Ability to define different email subject and header for different stores added.

source: https://www.cs-cart....log401beta.html

[imac]

Dear friends,

We are on bank holidays till Monday, so there is poor activity from our side these days.
Your feedback is much appreciated and we will get back to you next week.

[P-Pharma]

Dear Flow and SpyreDigital,

There is an ability to set different header/subject of a status for each storefront in v4
source: http://www.cs-cart.c...log401beta.html

Thats a good step, but we need seperate email templates, so that we can adjust the entire email message content to the proper identity. This includes the body and the signature.

[vanderex]

OMFG what a royal rumble..
im not even done fixing site to 3.0whatever and now 4.0 ? lol im starting to think goal is dissuade owners from doing it themselves and forcing to push the Request quote button ?

BTW API aint working... read post i put in issues..

[Pascal]

Wow.. I am looking forward to be able to use this new version ! Adds are so great

But I'm asking : do you plan to make the cs-cart 4 available as an update from our 3.06 or we shall make a new install like from 2 to 3 ?