CS-Cart releasesNews and announcements

Meet CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor 4.14.3 with improved product bundles

Alisa Maksina

Hello!

We have released CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor 4.14.3. It is a patch release, so it fixes problems and brings minor improvements. The full list of changes is in the documentation. Here we’ll only cover the most important changes. Significant improvement in the “Product bundles” add-on is such a change in 4.14.3.

Product Bundles improvements

Product Bundles is an add-on that we added in version 4.14.1. It allows you to create sets of products and offer discounts for them. Since version 4.14.1, we have received lots of suggestions and feature requests to improve the add-on. We released some of these improvements in version 4.14.2. In version 4.14.3 we are continuing to make bundles better.

  • We have improved the appearance of bundles on the storefront:
    • The section with bundles is more prominent now—it is no longer hidden in a separate product tab.
    • Customers now see the selected values of features and options for products in the bundle.
    • It is easier to understand the size of discount.
    • It is easier to add a bundle to cart.
  • We have increased performance of the Product Bundles add-on. Now CS-Cart works faster with huge bundles that consist of multiple variations. For instance, there is a bundle with six pieces of clothing in your store. A customer can choose a size and a color for each position in this bundle. In this case the CS-Cart database will store only one variant of the bundle instead of all possible variations of it. And this variant will be linked in the database to each possible combination.
  • We have improved features and options of bundled products:
    • The image of product from product bundles is now displayed correctly when a customer choses a feature variant;
    • If some products have both options and features set for them, you can make a bundle of these products. A customer can select a feature variant (size or color) or an option variant (with additional payment or without) for each product of this bundle.
  • We have added improvements to privileges in terms of bundle editing. For example, previously, a sales manager who could only view the list of products, could still remove products from any bundle. Now an administrator or vendor without the full access to editing products won’t be able to delete products from the bundles.
  • We have fixed the displaying of bundles with zero quantity products. If the Track inventory setting is disabled, the bundles with products out of stock will still be displayed on the storefront and customers will be able to buy these bundles. If you hide out-of-stock products, the bundles with those products will now be hidden as well.

Fully-translated CS-Cart for quick launch all over the world

Although we develop CS-Cart in English, it is used worldwide. And people prefer to have software in their own language. Luckily, our partners and community from all around the world help us with those translations. Human translation from those who know the product is the best kind of translation.

However, there are drawbacks to that approach. For example, translations for some languages weren’t complete. We understand that a fully-translated CS-Cart is important for launching a project faster. That’s why we are looking  into completing translations into various languages from all around the world. It may involve automatic translations (which have improved greatly over the last decade). The goal here is to save time for those who want to open their store or marketplace as soon as possible.

As of version 4.14.3, CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor are fully translated into 25 languages. New installations will get them by default. If you upgrade from a previous version, you can download the latest translations from translate.cs-cart.com and follow the instructions.

See the languages that have full translations
  • Arabic
  • Chinese Simplified
  • Czech
  • Danish
  • Dutch
  • English
  • Finnish
  • French
  • German
  • Greek
  • Hebrew
  • Hungarian
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Russian
  • Polish
  • Spanish
  • Turkish
  • Norwegian
  • Swedish
  • Portuguese, Brazilian
  • Romanian
  • Persian
  • Ukrainian

Administrators can add their own product reviews

There is an add-on in CS-Cart that allows customers to leave product reviews. However, some stores may use additional services to collect more user opinions. When buyers leave reviews about the product on a third-party service,  you might want to copy them to the corresponding product in the store. 

Previously, admins could only edit and reply to existing product reviews in the admin panel. We changed this in 4.14.3: now you can add new reviews on the “Reviews” tab on the product editing page.

Fields for keys in Google reCAPTCHA are now required

The Google reCAPTCHA add-on for anti-bot protection supports two reCAPTCHA versions: v2 (“select all squares with…”) and v3 (invisible reCAPTCHA). To use the captcha in the store, you have to specify API keys in the settings.

Starting from version 4.14.3, if reCAPTCHA v2 and/or v3 is selected for some object in the antibot settings section, then the fields with keys in the settings of these versions become mandatory. This will ensure that  administrators don’t forget to add the keys for the reCAPTCHA versions they use.

Improvements to Warehouses

The Warehouses add-on allows you to set different product quantities for different stores and warehouses. In version 4.13.3 we fixed some issues in the add-on regarding the quantities of products that are stored in warehouses. For example:

  • We improved product search by product quantity in the admin panel. Previously, if a product was out of stock in every warehouse, you could still see the product in the search results as if the quantity was greater than one.
  • We fixed the issue when there were multiple storefronts in the store, and each of the storefronts had its own warehouse with these products. Previously, if a product was out of stock on one of the storefront, the total product quantity of this product was calculated incorrectly. Now the calculation is correct; it is the total quantity from all warehouses where this product is in stock.

Automatic sitemap regeneration at certain time intervals

Previously, if you have added a new product, page, etc. and wanted to add it to the sitemap, you had to update the sitemap manually by clicking the “Regenerate a sitemap” button in the Google Sitemap add-on settings. Starting with version 4.14.3, you can generate the sitemap automatically. We added information on how to do it to the settings of the Google Sitemap add-on.

There are more changes in version 4.14.3. For the full list, check the changelog. 

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The updates to version 4.14.3 are already available. As usual, for the first couple of weeks after the release we hand out update packages in limited numbers, but then we lift that restriction. If you don’t see this update in your Upgrade Center yet, please check the update page later.