New CS-Cart.com

Today we introduce a new version of the website www.cs-cart.com. The site now features a brand new look-n-feel created by our design team and the improved navigation system that includes a drop-down menu at the top and a revamped navigation bar on the right allowing you to access the necessary information in a few clicks.

We are especially proud that the new cs-cart.com is built around the latest branch of CS-Cart, which is under development yet. This was extremely helpful for us to see our product in action and better understand its highs and lows as an exhaustive platform for a comprehensive ecommerce website, not just a powerful shopping cart component. While working on the new site, we fixed several bugs and made a number of useful improvements to the prospective CS-Cart 2.1 scheduled for this summer.

With regard to the site content, the new site still copies the old cs-cart.com. We have started to design a more clear site structure as well as revise the content to make it visual, pithy and concise. And we are open to any suggestions and advice, so you can influence the future of cs-cart.com.

CS-Cart is at version 2.0.15

CS-Cart 2.0.15 is mainly a bug fix release that introduces no new functionality, but only fixes the instable features of the previous CS-Cart versions. The most significant fixes and improvements include:

• Improved import/export procedures
• Ability to clear the cache from the Administration panel only. This improves the security of your store as an additional protection from DDoS attacks.
• Separate storage of product info for the products that are in the catalog and for the products that have been ordered by your customers. In previous CS-Cart versions, some of the product info in customer orders was taken directly from the product catalog, and if the store administrator changed the details of a product in the catalog, these changes also affected the customer orders. After we have placed the product info in the customer orders to a separate table in the store database, this is no longer the issue, and the store administrator can even remove a product from the catalog without changing the details of customer orders.
• Support for Paypal Express Checkout authentication by API signature. This makes the process of configuring PayPal Express Checkout in the CS-Cart Administration panel much easier.

And we also had to get rid of the phone number validation because different countries use different phone number formats, and the validation appeared to be too restrictive for many of our customers. For a complete list of changes, improvements and fixes, please refer to the changelog.

Public testing of CS-Cart Multivendor edition was started

We are glad to inform you about the alpha version release of the CS-Cart Multivendor edition. It can be downloaded from http://2tl.dev.cs-cart.com/releases/...ction=download

Main features:
- vendors creating;
- creating administrators for a vendor;
- the vendors are able to work with their own products and orders;
- the ability to set up vendor's own shippings;
- the main administrator is able to work on behalf of any vendor;

Main peculiarities of multivendor edition:
- All purchased products are paid for as one order, but then are split into several ones. One order for one vendor.
- At the moment the vendor's administrators are not distinguished by privileges.
- The vendor can use both general shipping methods (allowed by the administrator) and its own methods.
- All items that the vendor creates could not be seen to other vendors in the administration panel.
- Features, Global options can be used as global ones that are set by the administrator, and as personal that are set by the vendor.
- Reward points addon is not available for this version.


Working as vendor.
1. Creating and setting up the vendor.
In order to create a vendor, it is necessary to log in to the admin panel, go to the "Users" tab and select "Vendors".
Click the "add vendor" button, and complete the form.
The "General" tab - General information about your vendor company.
The "Categories" tab - The list of categories in which vendor can display his products.
The "Shipping methods" tab – Here the administrator will choose which shipping method defined in the main store could be used by the vendor.
After you have submitted the form, a new vendor will be created. Now you should create an administrator for this vendor.

2. Creating the administrator for the vendor.
Go to the "Administrators" list in the "Users" tab. Click on "add user". Complete all the required fields and select the "Vendor" that was created at the previous step.

3. Creating vendor products.
Now, when the vendor administrator has been created, you can log in. Log out from administration panel, and log in using the vendor administrator credentials at the same address (you_domain.com/admin.php).
Now you can create your own products and add shipping methods.

Also, you can act on behalf of a vendor in the admin area by simply selecting the necessary vendor in the select box near the currency select box at the top.


Bugtracker.
All bugs and feature requests regarding Multivendor edition could be posted to the bugtracker at http://bt-mve.cs-cart.com/ (note, you need to register first there).
Attention! Please do not post any bugs regarding this version to the forum bugtracker.

Forum.
We have also created a separate forum for discussing the Multivendor edition: http://forum.cs-cart.com/forumdisplay.php?f=54. Feel free to post any ideas and suggestions.