Cs-Cart & Multi-Vendor 4.3.4 Released

Hello,

We are happy to present to you another minor release of CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor.

434banner1.png

Version 4.3.4 lets you assign payment methods to shipping methods, adds birthday promotions, and improves the Upgrade Center.

Other honorable mentions in the new version:

- Right-to-left languages support makes CS-Cart more convenient for Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian speakers.

- A new notice on the storefront warns customers if their browsers don’t accept cookies. If the browser doesn’t accept cookies, the customer can have issues with logging in and placing orders.

- You can reorder products, categories, pages, and polls when you add them manually to the blocks in Design → Layouts. For example, when you showcase camping gear on your home page, reorder camping products to show tents at the top, sleeping bags in the middle, and backpacks at the bottom of the list:

- Customers can sign up using emails that contain Cyrillic symbols and special characters such as !, #, $, %, and &.

- Admins create backup files only in the “zip” format. We removed the ability to create “tgz” backup archives because they took too much operating memory during the archiving.

Note, that we've restricted only the creation of backups in the "tgz" format. Other functionality related to creating and unpacking archives was not affected. You can restore the "tgz" backups, install add-ons packed in the "tgz" archives, etc.

See all the improvements and fixes in the changelog.

Read our blog post for more information about the new features and video tutorials: http://blog.cs-cart.com/2015/09/09/cs-cart-and-multi-vendor-4-3-4-released/

Upgrade

License owners with active upgrade subscriptions will see a notification about the upgrade in their admin panels within a week.


Click the notification or visit the Upgrade Center to upgrade your store.

IMPORTANT! Before upgrading to 4.3.4 you will upgrade to 4.3.3.SP1. This maintenance patch enhances the Upgrade center so as the further upgrade to 4.3.4 will go smooth.

If you’re upgrading from CS-Cart 2 or 3, use the Store import add-on to migrate to version 4.3.2, and then upgrade via the Upgrade Center.

----------------------------------------------------------

Tell us how we can improve CS-Cart on our UserVoice. We greatly appreciate your ideas!

Report any issues to our bug tracker.

If you have any questions concerning the upgrade, feel free to ask them in the CS-Cart forum.


Follow CS-Cart on Facebook and Twitter to receive CS-Cart tips and the latest CS-Cart news.

Get this error when upgrading to 4.3.3 SP1

Validation Issue

Validation Restore returned fail status

Unable to prepare restore file File var/upgrade/restore.php was locally modified/renamed/removed. Restore the original restore.php file before the upgrade.

Thanks

It is probably a permissions issue. They do a call to the restore.php and look for it to return a 403 error to be sure it can be executed.

Thanks. Had the directory protected with password. Forgot about that



- Admins create backup files only in the “zip” format. We removed the ability to create “tgz” archives because they took too much space on the hard drive. Zip archives take less space and are more popular.

Want to explain this in more detail please? Since you seem to have stopped publishing the changes for addon developers, I need to know how this might impact my addon products and the archives that my customers have created. Also, are addon archives still being supported in the .tgz format?

Please get rid of Phar. I't a performance pig and takes 5X longer to create an archive than the old Tar_Archive class.

And what are all the new features/changes related to the upgrade process that were destined for V4.3.4? They don't seem to be listed in the changelog.

Good news, is time to check it. thx

Want to explain this in more detail please? Since you seem to have stopped publishing the changes for addon developers, I need to know how this might impact my addon products and the archives that my customers have created. Also, are addon archives still being supported in the .tgz format?

Please get rid of Phar. I't a performance pig and takes 5X longer to create an archive than the old Tar_Archive class.

Hello,

We've only restricted creating backups in "tgz" format. Any other functionality related to creating/unpacking archives wasn't affected at all. You can still restore "tgz" backup, but you can't create a new one. This was made because PharData class consumes a large amount of operating memory when creating backup (in fact, it puts all files that are being archived into memory, so if you have 2GB files to backup, it will use 2GB operating memory).

Also, we're now using "ZipArchive" class for creating zip-archives instead of "PharData" class. It's safer and faster.

Performance issues related to creating backup are not related to archiving files, the most part of time takes the process of copying files to temporary directories. This issue will be solved in next releases - backup will be created much more faster.

Since you seem to have stopped publishing the changes for addon developers

Post containing developer-related changes will be published on this forum today.

A few words more about "tgz" and "zip" changes in 4.3.4: I apologize for misunderstanding, because this paragraph is really unclear:

- Admins create backup files only in the “zip” format. We removed the ability to create “tgz” archives because they took too much space on the hard drive. Zip archives take less space and are more popular.

We will modify the text of the paragraph so it will represent the real changes related to archives that were made in 4.3.4 release.

Has anyone tested RTL? So many bugs on the demo

Too bad that this bug fix did not make it into the release yet:

http://forum.cs-cart.com/tracker/issue-5812-cs-cart-keeps-changing-unique-urls/

Only after that major issue is fixed we can start testing 4.3.X and start using multiple languages and front ends. Now we can only use 1 language and 1 front end without serious SEO problems and database corruption.

Too bad that this bug fix did not make it into the release yet:

http://forum.cs-cart.com/tracker/issue-5812-cs-cart-keeps-changing-unique-urls/

Only after that major issue is fixed we can start testing 4.3.X and start using multiple languages and front ends. Now we can only use 1 language and 1 front end without serious SEO problems and database corruption.

P-Pharma,

To be honest, you are the only one who bothered with this issue.

Anyway as I promised this fix is under my control and it will be included to the next version 4.3.5. We did not included it to 4.3.4 because it requires a lot QA time, and 4.3.4 priority was upgrade center.

Okay, so you admin the shortcomings of using Phar. Hallelujah!

Now, how do we get beyond all the upgrade issues that are cause by using Phar for backups and it failing and upgrades terminating?

I provide an EZ Admin addon that does backups of both DB and files. It uses your old Tar_Archive function. I'm assuming these archives will continue to be supported in your restore functions and will be seen as the appropriate "Type" in the newer backup/restore screen.

Please confirm. If they are not going to be supported, this is a major issue and one that you can't just pull the rug out from under us on. If my clients need to go back to a backup from 6 months ago, they better be able to do so.

Now, how do we get beyond all the upgrade issues that are cause by using Phar for backups and it failing and upgrades terminating?


There was several issues related to backup creation using PharData class (even in zip format). Now all of them are solved, because we now use ZipArchive class for packing/unpacking zip-archives. It's faster than PharData and much more reliable.

Please confirm. If they are not going to be supported, this is a major issue and one that you can't just pull the rug out from under us on. If my clients need to go back to a backup from 6 months ago, they better be able to do so.


In CS-Cart 4.x we definitely will not drop support of unarchiving tgz-archives.

We will probably compare PharData and Tar_Archive and choose the best one for working with tgz archives.

There was several issues related to backup creation using PharData class (even in zip format). Now all of them are solved, because we now use ZipArchive class for packing/unpacking zip-archives. It's faster than PharData and much more reliable.


In CS-Cart 4.x we definitely will not drop support of unarchiving tgz-archives.

We will probably compare PharData and Tar_Archive and choose the best one for working with tgz archives.

No they are not solved. They are only solved for 4.3.4 and beyond (to be proven). We still have the issue of existing sites that can't upgrade due to Phar issues/failures. See ticket number: 101343345. This is just one of many Phar related issues.

Just dump Phar. It was a bad choice. There's so much overhead in it for being able to execute files from an archive (functionality you don't use or support) that it destroys its usefulness for standard archiving.

I'd suggest you review your zip archive class with the tar archive class. I think you'll find the tar archiver to be faster and with better compression.

P-Pharma,

To be honest, you are the only one who bothered with this issue.

Anyway as I promised this fix is under my control and it will be included to the next version 4.3.5. We did not included it to 4.3.4 because it requires a lot QA time, and 4.3.4 priority was upgrade center.

We are surprised that no one else is bothered by changing URLs and keyword dilution, because changing URL's affects SEO and that affects income. Though most of the bugs are discussed in a support ticket. Seriously: We do not consider CS-Cart usable if it keeps changing URL's. Its one of the basic principles of web applications. If Google cant index your site properly then that's a no-go in our minds.

In any case: thank you for including it in the next release.

Oh, I noticed that I cannot trust cs-cart to handle my seo links back in 2x. So I got mod that makes link out of product title + sku number.html and this link never change unless I would change title (but this never happens).

We are surprised that no one else is bothered by changing URLs and keyword dilution, because changing URL's affects SEO and that affects income. Though most of the bugs are discussed in a support ticket. Seriously: We do not consider CS-Cart usable if it keeps changing URL's. Its one of the basic principles of web applications. If Google cant index your site properly then that's a no-go in our minds.

In any case: thank you for including it in the next release.

The download package from your site is missing several files:

admin.php

config.local.php

config.php

init.php

...the list goes on!

Oh, I noticed that I cannot trust cs-cart to handle my seo links back in 2x. So I got mod that makes link out of product title + sku number.html and this link never change unless I would change title (but this never happens).

Thats a smart approach to keep product URLS unique. But CS-Cart also keeps changing URLs for features, pages and categories. Does the mod resolve this too?

Features are blocked for indexation, I am considering those as duplicate content. Do not have good content pages so do not worry about them much, but did not see those affected.