Edition Changes
Good day,
Today I’d like to tell you about the changes in the CS-Cart product line, which are to come in action soon.
As CS-Cart Ultimate has been released the total count of CS-Cart editions has grown up to 4. Such a variety allowed us to cover the needs of a wide range of customers, but as a side effect choosing a proper edition has gotten more complex for our clients, and we had to spend more time and human resources on the whole line maintenance and cross-edition upgrades.
Eventually, we’ve come to the decision to simplify the edition set by reducing their number to 2. This measure will make it easier to find the right product edition and will positively affect the development process of the new CS-Cart versions.
Free Mode instead of Community Edition
The 1st change to come, which will be announced together with the CS-Cart 3.0.3 release, is the Community edition discontinuation.
Starting from version 3.0.3 no new Community licenses will be issued. Neither CS-Cart 3.0.3 nor any of the aftercoming releases will include Community edition. Though all current Community license owners will be able to continue using the software according to the license agreement.
As a replacement for CS-Cart Community, in the near future we will introduce the opportunity to use commercial CS-Cart Ultimate edition on a free basis, with functionality limitations identical to the ones currently present in Community edition.
In other words, there will be a distribution package (CS-Cart Ultimate), which will include the possibility of free usage. This will make switching to the full-featured commercial version much easier — just enter a valid commercial license key to unlock all the paid store features — no more edition upgrade needed!
Professional and Ultimate Editions United
The 2nd change will result in Professional and Ultimate editions being merged into a new united edition. Probably, we will keep the name “Ultimate” for it.
The new edition will collect the best out of the existing CS-Cart Professional and CS-Cart Ultimate to provide a more handy and versatile solution for all our clients. At the same time the edition will include the possibility of free usage, which is described above.
Here are some of the advantages of the new united edition:
- a license can be purchased with any number of storefronts starting from 1 (like having 1 CS-Cart Professional license)
- easy extending with additional storefronts (like in CS-Cart Ultimate)
- no more complicated license manipulations like converting Professional licenses to Ultimate Storefront ones
- no more painstaking choosing between Professional and Ultimate — you can start with a single storefront and then easily increase their number if you need to
- simple switching from free mode to commercial one with no need of the full-blooded software upgrade
- opportunity to try multi-store functionality for free
As for now the release date for the united edition is not defined, but we will do our best to get it released this year.
We’ll be happy to answer all your questions about the changes in CS-Cart editions. You can contact us via Twitter, Facebook or right here in the comments.
UPDATE: Converting Professional Edition licenses to additional storefronts of existing Ultimate licenses will be possible only until the release of the united edition.
As soon as the united edition is released, all the existing Professional licenses will be automatically converted to Ultimate core licenses with 1 storefront.
Note that it is not possible to merge multiple Ultimate licenses together in order to join their storefronts under a single Ultimate license.