Meet CS-Cart 4.13.1 with New Product Reviews

Hello! We have released CS-Cart 4.13.1. The change of the second number in the version usually means big improvements. The full list of changes is in the documentation, so we’ll only cover the most important changes here.

Product reviews with images, voting, etc.

Previously, product reviews in CS-Cart did the job, but were rather basic. Customers could rate the product, write a comment… and that’s it. Thanks to your feedback, reviews have received a lot of improvements in version 4.13.1.

Now reviews can include images, optional fields for advantages and disadvantages (can be disabled). You get notified about new reviews in the Notification Center and can leave your reply to the review for all the customers to see. Customers can vote for the reviews they find useful.To get these benefits, just install the Product Reviews add-on after the upgrade. We’ll guide you through the rest of the process. The video that we recorded during development provides more information.

Order discussion moved to Message Center

Previously, communication with customers about orders was handled by the “Comments and reviews” add-on. Since then, we created the “Message Center” add-on for continuous two-way communication. It offers notifications about new messages and gives you the context of each message.

After the upgrade, you’ll find all the messages about orders in the Message Center. But you’ll also be able to view relevant communication  from the page of each order.

List of add-ons improved

Many CS-Cart users extend the functionality of their sites with add-ons by various developers. When there are too many such add-ons installed in the store, managing them can get a little hard. 

That’s why we’ve reworked the list of add-ons and the detailed page of an add-on. Now it’s easier to:

• Find the add-on you need (thanks to search, filters, and favourite add-ons).
• Find out what the add-on does (thanks to the list of menu items that are introduced by the add-on).

We’ll keep improving the list of add-ons in the future versions. The ultimate goal is to make upgrading easier, even if you have third-party add-ons. Ideally, you should be able to upgrade your installation and all its add-ons with one click of a button.

New bulk selection of objects everywhere

If you’ve been using CS-Cart for a while, you know that the product list had a slightly different mechanism for the bulk selection of items. The context menu with available actions appears whenever you select an object or multiple objects. This draws attention to the actions that you can perform, and makes the menu more convenient on mobile devices.

In version 4.13.1, we have introduced this context menu to all lists of objects in the CS-Cart admin panel. The interface is now more standardized and easier to work with.

Other changes

• The precision of determining a customer’s country by IP has been improved.
• The Google Export add-on now has a new field called “Product availability. It automatically sets the product quantity in the feed to “In stock”, “Out of stock”, or “On backorder” depending on the quantity of the product you have in stock.
• The password rules in “Settings > Security settings” now also apply to customers, not only to administrators. By making the customers use the passwords that are complicated enough, you take one extra step towards the security of your store.
• jQuery UI was updated to version 1.12.1; search engines consider it more secure, and might treat your site better for it.
• Some of the issues we found with PHP 8.0 compatibility were fixed. It’s still too early to recommend using PHP 8.0 with CS-Cart, but we do intend to add the compatibility sooner rather than later.
• The scripts required for supporting Internet Explorer 11 in the admin panel were removed. That should make the admin panel load faster in newer browsers.
• eNETS payment method integration was removed. This wasn’t a decision we took lightly. But the old integration was no longer supported by eNETS, and the new technical restrictions on the eNETS site prevented a bug-free integration.

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The upgrades to version 4.13.1 are already available. As usual, for the first couple of weeks after the release we hand out upgrade packages in limited numbers, but then we lift that restriction. So if you don’t see this upgrade in your Upgrade Center yet, please try again later.