Today we would like to share some important news with you.
Together with the CS-Cart 4.1.1 release (expected in the next several months), some built-in add-ons will be published under a free license (probably, MIT) and their source code will be available for the general public on GitHub. Here are the add-ons namely:
- Affiliate
- Gift Registry
- Product Configurator
- Recurring Billing
- Statistics
Important! The listed add-ons will be excluded from the default CS-Cart 4.1.1 distribution package. The CS-Cart team will no longer develop these add-ons and they will not be adapted to CS-Cart 4.1.1+. Also, during a software upgrade to CS-Cart 4.1.1, all the mentioned add-ons will be disabled.
CS-Cart 4.0.3 (the nearest release) will still include all these add-ons, marked as "Deprecated" in the add-on list.
Each of the mentioned add-ons has its own strong reason to be excluded. For example, the Recurring Billing add-on is both rarely used and very complicated, and Gift Registry is only reasonable for really big-scale stores, which are by far a minority.
All these add-ons require time and constant developer attention to maintain, yet their usefulness for a CS-Cart store owner is questionable. By excluding those add-ons from the default CS-Cart distribution package we save the resources to spend on the core features. Releasing the add-ons under a free license will give them a chance to survive in the hands of third-party developers.
To make the transition easier for a CS-Cart store owner, we will suggest a third-party alternative for the Affiliate add-on, right here in the thread. Also, we have plans to embed some of the most important Google Analytics stats directly to CS-Cart to replace the Statistics add-on.
We believe that this change will make for better stability of the core CS-Cart functionality and overall quality improvement.
Thanks!