As usual we’ve made lots of changes and improvements but the most notable new features and imporvements include:

• Parent/Child hierarchy category management
• Treeview navigation menu with expand/collapse menu categories
• File caching for lower memory usage and faster page loads
• Recently viewed products functionality
• Related products functionality
• CSV Import (import 1000’s of products in seconds)

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• New product option to enable/disable file upload when ordering a product
• Support for user groups – access to categories and products can now be restricted
• Support for additional/replacement text on product prices

The file upload option gives customers the option to upload a file when ordering a particular product in the shopping cart. Useful if for example you want a customer to upload an image that can be then printed or inscribed etc. on a product.

With user groups you can for example create a reseller user group and then restrict reseller products and categories to be shown only to registered customers in the reseller user group.

More flexibility with the product prices now means if you don’t want to show a price on a product you can now enter text which will be shown instead if the price is zero or if greater than zero the text will be shown after the price.

A multitude of other minor improvements have also been made in this release.

CMS

• System renamed from shopping cart system to content management system
• Added new product enquiry form option that allows customers to email enquiries about individual products

E-commerce

• Added new product option to enable/disable add to cart buttons
• Added new product note option allowing customers to include notes when ordering a product
• Shopping cart menu now displays how many items are in cart
• New improved button images for add to cart, checkout, login etc.
• Added Qty field beside add to cart buttons

New features in more detail

Now when you add or modify a product you’ll see some extra options.

The first of which allows you to enable or disable the add to cart button for that product. When it’s disabled the product will still be shown to customers on your website but it will not be possible to buy it.

The product note option if enabled will display a text area on that products page so special instructions can be given by the customer when ordering that product.

The product enquiry form if enabled will display an enquiry form on that products page so customers can enquire about that product by email. This can be useful if you’ve disabled the add to cart button but would like to to receive queries on the product.

Other new features are the dispaying of how many items are in your cart on the shopping cart menu, so now customers can see how many items are in their cart at anytime without having to click into the shopping cart page. Quantity fields are now displayed beside add to cart buttons now so customers can easily add more than one product at a time to the their shopping cart.

• Improved sorting options for orders, customers, categories and products in admin
• Added new mailer tool to admin allowing text based emails to be sent to registered customers
• Added newsletter subscription option to customer myaccount preferences
• Added multiple image support for products – each product can now have multiple images or no image

We’ll be updating client websites with the new version over the coming weeks.