New minimum platform requirements and compatiblities

Isotope eCommerce 2.8 is the first version that is not compatible with Contao 3.5 anymore. Contao 3.5 has reached end of life already 2019 and we are thus convinced that everybody should have migrated to Contao 4 by now. The new minimum Contao version is 4.9 LTS and with this release we also ensure compatiblity with Contao 4.13 LTS which has been published not that long ago.

At the same time, we're also increasing the minimum required PHP version to PHP 7.2 and offically support PHP 8.0 and 8.1.

There's a new option in the page settings which is especially helpful for category pages: You can now prevent having any reader page for a given category page at all!

Products will then have no detail page which can be desired for very simple lists. The good thing is that in that case you also won't have any reader pages generated for Contao's sitemap.xml or search index!

Up until now, you had the option to exempt a given product (or all products of a given product type) from shipping. If your customer had only such products in the cart, both, the customer address step as well as the shipping method step would be skipped in the checkout module. This is very useful for digital products like downloads that never require any shipping.

However, and that's your new feature in Isotope eCommerce 2.8, there are also pick up products. Products that cannot be shipped and thus the address step is not required but the shipping method step is still required in order to choose the desired pickup location.

And here comes another major feature! Up until now, if you wanted to display e.g. gross prices for guests and net prices for logged in members, you had to configure two store settings and ensure you switched those accordingly.

This has now been simplified a great deal by providing this option in every member group. If a member is assigned to multiple member groups the first member group assigned will be taken into account for this new feature.

This attribute allows for a completely new price calculation method in Isotope eCommerce! Granted, its name is a bit confusing. Unfortunately, naming things is one of the hardest things to do.

The functionality is rather simple, but can be used in complex conditions. For the attribute, an amount will be entered in the product in the back end. Visitors then enter a quantity in the front end, which is multiplied with said price. Some examples of applications:

• As a donation: By setting the attribute price to 1, the visitor can enter an amount of 10 or 100 or 1000 items to get a freely configurable price.
• As a coupon amount: Setting the attribute price to 10 can allow visitors to enter a coupon amount in steps of 10.
• As a software license: The product costs 100€, an additional fee of 5€ should be charge per user account. Visitors can enter the number of seats required to get the final price.

There are certainly plenty of other applications. Be aware that each product can have an unlimited number of these attributes, and the calculated price is added to the product price itself (and applies to its tax calculation).

For years now, our users had to configure related products using a comma-separated list of related product IDs which was anything but user friendly. Now, thanks to the hard work on the Contao core itself, arbitrary pickers are a lot easier to implement and so we now finally have a beautiful widget!

The front end module «Range filter» was so far able to filter products where an attribute is within a certain range (from/to). An example would be to filter for products with a price between 100€ and 200€. The front end part was implemented using noUiSlider to create a slider with two pickers.

In version 2.8, this range filter was extended with additional modes:

• Range equals to the existing behaviour, filtering a value range on one attribute.
• Higher than only shows products where the selected attribute is greater than the input from the front end.
• Lower than only shows products where the selected attribute is smaller than the input from the front end.
• Value within basically matches an inverted range filter. The front end input must be greater than the first and smaller than the second attribute.

Ready for another major feature? Did you ever encounter the situation where you wanted to have your T-shirt color variant dropdown to include information like the price or even the image?

In Isotope eCommerce 2.8 you can now have a custom template in every attribute configuration and do whatever your heart desires!

When using the options manager, you can now assign arbitrary CSS classes to every single option. This will make it so much easier for you to style the different options, add icons and much more.

Isotope eCommerce 2.8 is packed with tons of other smaller features such as additional UX improvements like displaying variant prices and SKUs directly in the back end list view or not displaying print PDF icons if there are no downloads in the order details.

Lots of payment methods have received internal updates making them more reliable and more secure.

Of course there are also major improvements for developers all across the codebase such as support for notification tokens for custom payment or shipping methods. Adding tokens for your shipping tracking URLs or IDs is now easier than ever! Moreover, payment and shipping methods can now decide whether they have a back end interface or not and much more, checkout the Changelog for more!