As announced on August 6th, the whole Isotope eCommerce team has been working very hard the past few weeks on the new version. A lot of new features have been added and big pieces of code have been rewritten from scratch. It was clear from the very beginning that the € 5'000 we raised during our fundraising campaign was not going to be sufficient, so of course we wanted to do our bit too.

The first beta version serves mainly to gather feedback regarding the installation process and the handling. It should correctly resolve all the dependencies and should whet your appetite for more to come. ;-)

This is also why the first beta does not contain all features and is being published with Known Issues. That being said, we would like to emphasize it one more time: beta versions are never suited to be used in production!

We kindly ask you to test this version extensively in your development environments. Please report issues that are not already a Known Isssue (see further down) or already present on the tracker on GitHub.

You can help us by using the prefix [2.0 beta1] in the title of the issue.

Improvements and new features

Besides completely rewriting/reworking about 90% of the the code base, there are a ton of small improvements, some of which we would like to list here:

• We are now compatible with and only with Contao 3.1.3+! This also includes modifications to Contao's new user interface concepts. For example, we now edit the advanced prices in a popup just like you manage your files or page tree choices.
• Completely reworked the back end interface for better product management. We hope that we can finally get rid of the performance issues and provide better filter possibilities. Moreover, edit multiple is now available for products as well as variants.
• A whole new reporting module that provides the foundation for any kind of reports. For now there are sales reports. This module has been funded and made available as open source by Leo Feyer for the Contao official theme store, for which we would like to say "thank you!"
• The invoice templates of Isotope 1.4 have been replaced by configurable documents. Besides the fact that this builds the foundation for future documents (such as packing slips etc.) every developer now has the ability to implement his or her own document rendering engines.
• Galleries are now configurable just like documents are and thus require no template-modification. As documents they can be used anywhere within Isotope and extended by third party developers.
• A lot of the existing payment modules have been integrated into the core and are going to be maintained as from now. This makes sure that the modules are always on up-to-date and you can be sure they are being maintained.
• Templates have been unified wherever possible. The display of the product list in the shopping cart, the checkout, e-mails and order history can now be modified using a single template.
• Overall, Isotope 2.0 should show increased performance from its predecessor, even if beta1 has not been fully optimized just yet.

Known Issues

A few errors could not be fixed either for technical or time-related reasons in beta1:

• The versioning of prices and categories (new feature) does currently not work as it requires changes on the contao core. They will only be implemented in version 3.2, which means that Isotope 2.0 stable will require that you use Contao 3.2 as a dependency. Both are announced to be released at the end of the year, so this should not cause any troubles for planning your projects.
• The permission management for product groups is currently not available. This is due to the dependency "backend_tabletree" which is currently not compatible with Contao 3.1. We are in touch with the developer though.
• The from-price display does not work properly yet. For example, from-prices are not calculated correctly over multiple variants.
• If you are using Advanced prices you were able to disable a variant by not giving it any price at all up to now (e.g. for a second shop). This feature is currently missing.

Missing features

In addition to that there are a few features that still have to be completely rebuilt due to all the technical modifications from version 1.4:

• Apart from the flat shipping module, all shipping modules have been removed. We plan to implement a more flexible shipping module that compeltely covers the current functionality.
• It is currently not possible to attach a document to the order confirmation emails. Stay tuned for a complete rewrite of the email functionality!
• The payment modules for Cybersource and Authorize.Net have been removed from the core.
• Because the data structure has changed so much, the rules module is currently not working. It is thus deactivated.
• The migration from 1.4 to 2.0 is not possible in beta1.

We hope you have fun with the new features!

The Isotope eCommerce team