Four Community-Suggested Features to Land in CS-Cart 4.2
Hi!
Today, I’d like to tell you about some cool new features to land in our next major release, CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor 4.2. These goodies will bring more user- and SEO-friendliness to CS-Cart, to help your business bloom and your profits grow.
Since these features have been suggested by the members of our awesome community, we are extremely happy to include them in our software.
Responsive Design
Making CS-Cart’s storefront more mobile-friendly was suggested in April 2013, back when CS-Cart 3 was the latest major version and the visual framework behind our storefront was 960.gs.
A lot has changed since then. We’ve switched to Twitter Bootstrap, which has made it much easier to develop a responsive storefront theme, and we’re happy to announce that CS-Cart 4.2 will play well with screens of all sizes.
Google’s Rich Snippets
You’ve probably seen those little chunks of text under every Google search result. They’re called “snippets,” and they help users better understand what a particular site is about and why it’s relevant to their search term.
If you mark up your webpage in a certain way, Google can go further and create a rich snippet—a special widget that will show detailed information specific to your page. For example, a product page can contain its rating and reviews. This information can be shown in a rich snippet.
Adding the support of rich snippets in CS-Cart was suggested long ago, and we’re happy to finally implement it in our next major version.
Improved SEO Name Policy
As for now, if an item in your store has an SEO name, this name must be unique across the whole catalog and across all types of items. Some users have reasonably pointed out, however, that this behavior can be somewhat restricting.
For example, currently, you can’t have two subcategories with the same SEO name—even if they are in different categories—because the resulting URLs would be unique (e.g., mystore.com/men/pants and mystore.com/women/pants).
Starting with version 4.2, the SEO name policy will be improved to allow duplicate SEO names; only the whole URL will have to be unique.
UPD: Automatic Canonical URLs to Avoid Duplicate Pages
Another great improvement in our SEO add-on in version 4.2 are automatically generated canonical URLs. This info will help Google and other search providers avoid duplicating pages during indexation.
E.g, mystore.com/pants and mystore.com/pants?size=M will be considered the same page, not two different ones.
The 301 Status Page Redirection
CS-Cart 4.2 will introduce an easier way to move a product, category, or page from one URL to another. Using the standard 301 HTTP status, your store will be able to seamlessly redirect a visitor to the new item location, as suggested in our UserVoice.
You are very welcome to share your ideas about how to improve CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor. If you happen to find a bug, please report in on our bug tracker.
Stay tuned to our Twitter and Facebook, as well as our YouTube channel, for the latest news about CS-Cart software.