Four Community-Suggested Features To Land In Cs-Cart 4.2

Hi!



Today, I’d like to tell you about some cool new features to land in our next major release, CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor 4.2. These goodies will bring more user- and SEO-friendliness to CS-Cart, to help your business bloom and your profits grow.



Since these features have been suggested by the members of our awesome community, we are extremely happy to include them in our software.



[size=5]Responsive Design[/size]



Making CS-Cart’s storefront more mobile-friendly was suggested in April 2013, back when CS-Cart 3 was the latest major version and the visual framework behind our storefront was 960.gs.



A lot has changed since then. We’ve switched to Twitter Bootstrap, which has made it much easier to develop a responsive storefront theme, and we’re happy to announce that CS-Cart 4.2 will play well with screens of all sizes.



[size=5]Google’s Rich Snippets[/size]



You’ve probably seen those little chunks of text under every Google search result. They’re called “snippets,” and they help users better understand what a particular site is about and why it’s relevant to their search term.



If you mark up your webpage in a certain way, Google can go further and create a rich snippet—a special widget that will show detailed information specific to your page. For example, a product page can contain its rating and reviews. This information can be shown in a rich snippet.







Adding the support of rich snippets in CS-Cart was suggested long ago, and we’re happy to finally implement it in our next major version.



[size=5]Improved SEO Name Policy[/size]



As for now, if an item in your store has an SEO name, this name must be unique across the whole catalog and across all types of items. Some users have reasonably pointed out, however, that this behavior can be somewhat restricting.



For example, currently, you can’t have two subcategories with the same SEO name—even if they are in different categories—because the resulting URLs would be unique (e.g., mystore.com/men/pants and mystore.com/women/pants).



Starting with version 4.2, the SEO name policy will be improved to allow duplicate SEO names; only the whole URL will have to be unique.



[size=5] UPD: Automatic Canonical URLs to Avoid Duplicate Pages[/size]



Another great improvement in our SEO add-on in version 4.2 are automatically generated canonical URLs. This info will help Google and other search providers avoid duplicating pages during indexation.



E.g, mystore.com/pants and mystore.com/pants?size=M will be considered the same page, not two different ones.





[size=5]The 301 Status Page Redirection[/size]



CS-Cart 4.2 will introduce an easier way to move a product, category, or page from one URL to another. Using the standard 301 HTTP status, your store will be able to seamlessly redirect a visitor to the new item location, as suggested in our UserVoice.



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You are very welcome to share your ideas about how to improve CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor. If you happen to find a bug, please report in on our bug tracker.



Stay tuned to our Twitter and Facebook, as well as our YouTube channel, for the latest news about CS-Cart software.

A very good move in cs-cart revolution!

Do we have any timeframe for 4.2 release?

These are all really good changes and it's great to see CS-Cart giving priority to real world needs. Each of of these is something that's come up on recent projects and so our client's will love these changes.



Good work and thank you!



Happy Fruit Bat

Sounds great. Hopefully more stability comes along with these excellent moves forward.

Great News!!

Canonical URL and Duplicate Content fixed… This is a major flaw in Cs-Cart… It would be nice to see this fixed finally so we don't have to buy additional addon's to fix it. If your going to fix SEO then fix it completely.

Great news!



+1 for a Canonical URL and Duplicate Content fix built into the cart.

[quote name='CarStickersDecals' timestamp='1392927517' post='177900']

Canonical URL and Duplicate Content fixed… This is a major flaw in Cs-Cart… It would be nice to see this fixed finally so we don't have to buy additional addon's to fix it. If your going to fix SEO then fix it completely.

[/quote]



Sure, this will also be fixed. Generating canonical URLs will, in fact, resolve the duplicate content issue.

[quote name='kmolchanov' timestamp='1392971685' post='177925']

Sure, this will also be fixed. Generating canonical URLs will, in fact, resolve the duplicate content issue.

[/quote]



That is awesome news… Definitely cannot wait now…

Hello, will this be LTS (Long term support) version?

Please, read and consider our idea as it seems that no one from Cs-Cart has read it yet: Long Term Support (Lts) - General Questions - CS-Cart Community Forums It is an important but somehow underrated and overlooked topic.

The idea would be beneficial for all the parties involved.

Thanks!

Hello Sadec76,



Yes, CS-Cart 4 is a long-term support release. Please, refer to my earlier posts:



CS-Cart 4 Final Released - Page 14 - News and Announcements - CS-Cart Community Forums - Page 14



and



CS-Cart 4 Final Released - Page 14 - News and Announcements - CS-Cart Community Forums - Page 14

Hello admin,

please read the forum post I mentioned in my post #11 we talk about specific ideas on how to do the LTS. That is what I meant by the LTS version. Mainly it talks about the LTS version as a version without almost any new features and mostly bugfixes.



Thanks for the reply!

Hello,



Great to hear about responsive design.



A few questions:

Will the CS-Cart 4.2 use Bootstrap 3?



Will there be options to assign more thumbnail sizes and load them based on resolution (reduce image sizes for mobile devices)?



Will we be able to assign different CSS files to be compressed and loaded for different resolutions (server smaller CSS file sizes for mobile devices to load the site faster)?



Thanks

Great news, great features. Can't wait for this release!

When is 4.2 projected release date?

This is great news!

As the front end will be rewritten to become responsive and include microdata, I assume that it will break all custom styles and various addons. So those of us who intent to create addons or styles for CS-Cart 4 may want to wait it out.

Is there any indication of an ETA? i.e. are we talking about a few weeks, months, quarters or a year?

It would be very useful to know, so that we can decide what to do and avoid a CSC3 situation.

[quote name='P-Pharma' timestamp='1394475801' post='179054']

This is great news!

As the front end will be rewritten to become responsive and include microdata, I assume that it will break all custom styles and various addons. So those of us who intent to create addons or styles for CS-Cart 4 may want to wait it out.

Is there any indication of an ETA? i.e. are we talking about a few weeks, months, quarters or a year?

It would be very useful to know, so that we can decide what to do and avoid a CSC3 situation.

[/quote]

Not only will it probably break styles, but it will probably be riddled with additional bugs again and will hurt the long-term support that we so desperately need! We need a stable, modern version of CS that is not thrown away quickly of filled with bugs.

Also should fix the way emails are handled in 4.2. I get 40-50 emails per day on average. Every single emails shows that the email was submitted from “mydomain.com”. I had to get a mod created so that it shows the persons actual name/email that the email is coming from, instead of showing mydomain.com name. As it is, when an email comes in, you can not tell who it is from, other than it was submitted from your site. Its impossible to find anything like that.

[quote name='clips' timestamp='1394492831' post='179065']

Not only will it probably break styles, but it will probably be riddled with additional bugs again and will hurt the long-term support that we so desperately need! We need a stable, modern version of CS that is not thrown away quickly of filled with bugs.

[/quote]

It would be truly awesome if Simbirsk would fix all confirmed bugs within the 4.2.x series. At least then there would be some stable ground to build upon, instead of moving from buggy overhaul to buggy overhaul.