Version compatibility

One of the biggest features of Isotope eCommerce is the seamless integration with Contao. This also means that whenever possible we try to take advantage of any new Contao features. We have therefore decided to release version 2.2 only from Contao 3.3 and up.

Since Contao itself has long-term support, we obviously cannot simply ignore version 3.2. Therefore Isotope 2.1 will be supplied with bug fixes until the end of long-term support for Contao 3.2 (June 2015)!

Thus, the motto is the same as for Contao itself: Want the new features? Update to the latest versions of both Contao and Isotope.

What's new for users?

• A new addition is the "Options Manager" for attributes. Rather than managing the options as a list of keys and values as in the previous versions of Isotope (which of course is still possible for backward compatibility purposes, but is now considered the "obsolete" way), the options can now be defined in more detail. The Options Manager offers a greater overview and the possibility of translating options directly, thus facilitating the handling of multilingualism. One can now - if the checkbox "Customer defined" is activated - also define that the options can be configured per product which results in the Options Manager appearing in the edit mode of the product. Thus, the options for each product can be applied differently now. The Options Manager, incidentally, provides the basis for price increases and reductions depending on the selected option. Isotope will thus soon support the classic pizza use case in which each selected option has a price surcharge. This feature is in development and not yet included beta1.

• We are now equipped with an Integrity Check! It is available in Isotope configuration settings and should be carried out especially during development and before any issue report on GitHub. The Integrity Check tries to elicit inconsistencies in the database and the system in general and (if possible) also offers the option to automatically fix the problem. An example would be the configuration of a product type with variants, which is later converted back to be "without variants". This results in unnecessary variants in the database that will be detected by the Integrity Check with a single click.
• There are new payment methods. This time it is Paybyway and ePay that made it into the Core.
• Added thanks to Christoph Wiechert was the video / audio product attribute. It behaves just the same as known from the Contao Core content element. Thus, you can now easily use videos or audio files for your product views.
• Also thanks to Christoph Wiechert's help, you can now send notifications when a customer address has been changed. To do so, use the new notification type in the notification center.
• Attributes of the type textfield and textarea can now be equipped with the HTML attribute for placeholder (placeholder). The textfield now also supports a minimum length (minlength).
• Payment and shipping methods can now be restricted to shop configurations. This can be particularly useful if, for example, a payment method for a certain currency cannot be offered because the vendor does not offer it.
• The templates of galleries can now be overwritten by template selection. You can now edit several standard galleries and customize their templates individually.
• There are new simple tokens. Most notably the simple token "collection_*". In conjunction with the new features in the dependencies of Isotope eCommerce a formatted output like "Your order of xx/xx/xxxx" can be generated. To do this, use "{{formatted_datetime::##collection_locked##::m/d/Y}}".
• Some minor backend improvements for better usability.

What's new for developers?

• The "calculatePrice" hook now passes the selected product options as argument. You can thus now finally change the price of the product based on those options.

What's up next?

Besides the already mentioned price surcharge feature we plan to add another payment method (Billpay) and a shipping surcharge/tax surcharge calculator for the Release Candidate and the final release.

An indicative schedule: Release Candidate by the end of September and the first stable release by the end of October.

The migration tool for migrating from version 1.4 to 2.2 will also follow by the end of October.

Have fun with the new features!

The Isotope eCommerce Team