Over 500 commits (!) have been pushed to the RC1 of Isotope eCommerce since the release of beta1. Besides those commits, we have also reworked the dependencies and even built a completely new extension almost over night!
Because this version is a Release Candidate, we are now in "Feature Freeze" mode. This means that we will not add any new features but are only going to fix bugs. Reminder: using this version in production is not recommended.
As mentioned in a past blog post, Isotope eCommerce 2.0 RC1 is only compatible with Contao 3.2 RC1+.
Also, please note that migration to RC1 is not possible neither from beta1 nor from version 1.4.
General improvements
These smaller improvements are awaiting you in RC1:
- Obviously a lot of bugs have been fixed. We would like to thank Philipp Kaiblinger who was curageous enough to try to migrate to a beta version of Isotope eCommerce 2.0 and provided us with a lot of bug reports.
- The product overview in the back end got some fine tuning.
- The redirect page settings for the product reader are not performed in the front end modules anymore. Isotope now assumes that the product is on the same page as the list. Thus you need to place the reader module and the list module on the same page. This brings us fancier URLs and also - for all the SEO fanatics amongst you guys - the possibility to automatically add canoncial URLs. We will present this feature in more detail in a separate blog post.
- A small hint in the shop configuration introduces the user to the first steps with Isotope so newcomers don't feel completely lost.
- The rules are back!
Notification Center
A completely new extension on which Isotope eCommerce now depends calls itself "Notification Center". It supports multiple gateways, so it will be a piece of cake in the future to send text message notifications as an example. The core of the Notification Center currently ships with a default eMail gateway only. The Notification Center allows you to add as many notifications as you like. A notification is always made up of multiple messages with one or multiple languages. For a new order you can now not only send an eMail with one recipient but for example something like this: The customer receives a notification in his/her language with an order confirmation attachment (you remember the newly introduced "documents"?). At the same time the administrator receives a different eMail and his supervisor even another one.
The most important feature though is the documentation of "Simple Tokens"! You even get autocomplete functionality: by typing "##" you immediately know, what Simple Token you have to use for your eMail. A real user experience improvement!
New shipping method
This version ships with a new shipping method. It allows you to group other shipping methods and calculate the price based on that (e.g. the cheapest, the most expensive or the total). Isotope eCommerce 2.0 thus brings you even more flexibility while still allowing you to achieve the same functionality as in version 1.4.
Drag n' drop image upload
Until this day you had to save the product record every time you wanted to upload an image to edit its additional meta information.
We are now using Ajax and also offer drag n' drop functionality. We are really happy about this long overdue improvement!
Fundraising
With today's announcement of RC1 we also launch a new fundraising regarding the migration from Isotope eCommerce 1.4 to Isotope eCommerce 2.0.
Please read the details of the fundraising carefully so you do not expect something different than we would like to provide.
We hope you enjoy Isotope eCommerce!
The Isotope eCommerce Team
