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We are working on SilverCart 1.3

Posted by Ramon Kupper on 18 January 2012 | 6 Comments

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With the announcement of SilverStripe 3 and the first preview versions, we found ourselves trapped in a deadlock. We knew that we had to modify the administration area to enable new features, but have been hesitating to do so and trying to stall for time. Since the architecture of the admin area in SilverStripe 3 is subject to heavy modification, we were afraid we will have to do it all over again once SilverStripe 3 is out.

Reality catches up

It took us a while to realize that SilverStripe 3 is still work in progress and that SilverCart has grown much more than we initially expected since the announcement of SilverStripe 3. Taking this into account, porting SilverCart to SilverStripe 3 will take longer than we expected back then when we had our first tests with the SilverStripe 3 alpha in June 2011. As you hopefully may have noticed, SilverCart has grown vastly in the last 8 months.

Additionally, we will be faced with clients using SilverStripe 2 for quite some time even after SilverStripe 3 is released. Not everybody can update right on the spot, and not everybody will. Remember PHP4?

This is why we have delayed some very important refactoring and redesigning tasks - until now.

Working on it

Some weeks ago we have started to work on SilverCart 1.3. Features that are confirmed to make it into SilverCart 1.3 are:

  • improved support for multilanguage online stores
  • improved and streamlined administration area
  • product variations (this feature is already productive for our client Schuhfabrik Walber: walber-schuhe.de)

While there are some more features in the queue, we are not sure which ones will make it into the next release of our OpenSource eCommerce Software. Stay tuned for updates on that matter.

Timeline

We try to have the features for SilverCart 1.3 complete by the end of February 2012. Right after that, we will start the quality assurance phase. A public beta should be available in march.

 

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Comments

  • Stijn De Lathouwer, 19/01/2012 11:51am (4 months ago)

    I'm really interested to see the improved support for multilanguage online stores. That seems to be a bit lacking at the moment.

  • Ramon, 19/01/2012 7:46pm (4 months ago)

    Hi Stijn,
    you are so right. We have never been really happy with the implementation. And if we had more resources, we would be able to improve so much more.

    With our new implementation every dataobject has certain attributes that are translateable. We don't use translateable extension for dataobjects any more. This is necessary because of the way SilverStripe handles translateable dataobjects: all attributes like price, amount in stock are being cloned along with the dataobject and this behaviour is not wanted in an eCommerce scenario.

    To make a long story short: we have to refactor every business object that SilverCart implements and this is why we have been avoiding it like the plague and delaying it so long. SilverCart 1.3 was never meant to be released - after v1.2 we wanted to start with SilverCart 2.0 for SilverStripe 3 as soon as possible.

    I think Roland will write about the multilingial thingy very soon, since it really is his baby ;-)

    Cheers
    Ramon

  • Roland Lehmann, 02/02/2012 9:55am (4 months ago)

    Hello Stijn,\nI am done with implementing the multilingual feature. We just need some hallway testing and then a beta version can be released. The multilingual support will officially published with version 1.3.

  • Jose A., 22/03/2012 2:08pm (2 months ago)

    Hello !

    With version 3 you are going to include support for taxes in zones (countries )?

    Regards,
    Jose

  • Jose A., 22/03/2012 2:33pm (2 months ago)

    Hello again!

    In future versions of SilverStripe are you going to include these features?
    - Possibility of paying an undetermined amount. A product, that is an edit field that allows to the user to put the amount due.
    - Discount System based in points. In affiliation and loyalty programs is normal to reward the users with points that after they can interchange with a bonus in the purchase of a product. Let's say that we would be putting the value of 1 point, if a customer has 10 points and each point has a value of 5, he could deducted from the product 50 €.

    I take the opportunity to congratulate you for SilverCart. It is a wonderful product.
    Your are a crack. :)

    Regards,
    Jose

  • Ramon, 26/03/2012 9:57am (2 months ago)

    Hi Jose,
    thank you very much for your kind words. It's great to see how much you appreciate SilverCart and we are glad it proves useful for you.

    As for your requests, we have no current plans to implement them yet. But we never know, once a client needs a specific feature and agrees to publish it open source, it might happen very quickly.

    We already offered a similar discount system like you proposed to a client, but unfortunately he postponed the project to an uncertain date.

    Cheers
    Ramon