CubeCart Development Blog

Oh have we been busy!! It is exciting to show you just some of the cool stuff we have been doing.

Many complaints have been made about the current CubeCart v4 filemanagement system. We listen and have been busy completely revamping it for you.

Scenario: We wish to add a new television with six images. We can use the built in filemanager to create a folder called “television”. Navigating into this folder we can choose to upload all six images at once.

We “save settings” and CubeCart shows us the images in the correct folder.

The product has already been added so we select it from the product list page.

This presents the edit product page split nicely into tabs.

The administrator clicks the images tab which loads a dynamic file tree. These folders can be opened and closed dynamically loading the content. This is a fast easy solution to then click the tick or cross to add or remove them from the product detail page.If the image name is clicked an image preview will load.

Pretty cool don’t you think? Oh, did we mention you can crop images too?!

As it’s been a while since I made a blog post, I thought I’d treat you all to a few sneak peaks at what we’ve been working on.

For some time, we’ve been planning on improving the Administration System, so we’ve been revamping the whole thing.

But it’s not just aesthetic, we’ve made some big changes to the underlying code too, in an attempt to make it as user friendly and intuitive as possible. This is being developed in parallel to the current release branch, to ensure full compatibility with your existing databases. But don’t expect to see it for a while, as this is a work in progress, and there’s a lot left to do. This is being developed with the strict release schedule of “when it’s completely ready”.

Site Documents:

All Documents (e.g. Terms and Conditions, Homepages) are now managed through a single section, with a visible list of all the translations for that page.

Store Settings:
The settings page was a very long muddle, but we’ve decided to break it down into tabbed sections, with relevant and understandable headings. The best bit? You can change between tabs, editing as much as you need to, but only hit save once.

Customers:
This isn’t a massive change here, but it looks nice

Order Searching:

We’ve recently started work on a friendlier, ‘find-as-you-type’ system for searching orders

Tax Rules:

These have been given a massive overhaul, with the ‘flexible taxes’ becoming the default, and only, system. They’re fully compatible with your existing rules, but with a few extra surprises!

As many of you will know we took the fairly brave decision to release all new version of CubeCart v4 to only work with PHP5 or above after PHP 4 hit its end of life a few months ago. Some may have thought that we were cutting of our nose despite our face in that a large chunk of customers may not be able to use CubeCart 4.2 or above. We were anxious about this but went ahead as planned.

How did it work out?
Shortly after PHP5’s end of life there were distinct changes in the hosting world. The sheer cut throat competition of the industry has forced most hosting companies to work out a solution to keep customers who are stuck with old legacy code that were worried about compatibility issues with PHP5 and those who demand it for applications like CubeCart. The result of this has been interesting and now the major players (and small ones too) in the hosting industry have provided their customers with the ability to use PHP4 or PHP5 on their hosting accounts. This seems to be a fantastic solution and in some cases the PHP version can even be specified per directory in the public html folder.

Because of this the take up of CubeCart v4.2 and above has been very high and we are really pleased that the hosting industry reacted so well to it.

I’m running CubeCart v4.1.x how can I get PHP5 and use the latest release of CubeCart?
Well you may already be running it. Firstly login to the admin side of your store. You should see the PHP version installed on your hosting account right there on the admin homepage. If it is PHP5 great you can upgrade now! If it is PHP4 have alook at your hosting companies website as they will normally have a guide about how PHP5 can be enabled using a php.ini or .htaccess file. Some even have the option to enable it though the web hosting control panel which makes life really easy.

Where is the future going with CubeCart & PHP5?
Well in complete honestly CubeCart v4 is not yet using PHP5 to its full potential. Our developers work every day to rework the code to be fast, more secure and easier to work with. We really look forward to showing you some of the future plans we have for CubeCart but that will follow later.

If you have any questions about this feel free to drop our sales/support guys an email or leave a comment.

We really hope you agree that this has been a positive move towards the future of CubeCart and we really welcome any feedback you have.

Firstly, we would like to wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year. We are pleased to say that CubeCart v4.1.0RC2 has proved to be very stable and with a few tweaks to the license system has made it easier than ever to get up and running too. We have taken on extra staff to increase the standard and hours available for technical support via our helpdesk. Well over 1,500 live stores are now powered by v4 and more and more sign up every day.

4.1.0 final will be released within a week or writing this and fixes just a handful of minor bugs in RC2. There have been a lot of unfounded rumours about a “Gold” version. We are unsure where this came from but I would like to officially say that there will be no such thing. We apologise if the RC badges have caused confusion. It was badged this way for the new tax inclusive prices feature which has been received well.

After 4.1.0 is released our attention will be focused on 4.2.0 which will have improvements to take more advantage of PHP 5 and from this time onwards some of the functionality will cease to work with PHP 4. Our main concerns are improvements for store owners with substantial inventories and the rewrite of the product options section with custom fields (e.g. Text input boxes).

A more detailed 4.2.0 blog entry will be posted soon. We would like to warn in advance that our minimum requirements will change so that PHP 4 is no longer supported. As of 31st of December 2007 PHP 4 reached its end of life by its creators “The PHP Group” and we are members of the GoPHP5 initiative.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact our sales staff who will be delighted to assist you.

I am pleased to give an insight into development of the office elastic band ball with this exclusive photograph taken on a crappy camera phone.

As you can see it is starting to become quite an impressive size. We will post back from time to time with development progress. We would like to thank Royal Mail for the red elastic bands as they are our favorite.

First of all we are really pleased to announce that we have two new official members of staff. Please welcome Bill (Sir William) & Milos (Convict) who have joined the technical support team. We are really pleased to have them on board, and we are sure you will all make them feel welcome.

CubeCart 4.0.x
As I am sure many have been aware we have had to roll out a few minor releases to patch quite a few production release bugs. In complete honesty, there have been more than we had anticipated and we are grateful your patience and support. We have been working around the clock to fix these and we will be releasing 4.1.x very shortly indeed.

CubeCart 4.1.x
As previously mentioned this will be available to download very soon. This is only a minor version release and it will contain the following changes:

• Option for displaying tax inclusive prices for products, displayed with a breakdown at the checkout.
• DHTML navigation menu now caches the rendered HTML for a performance improvement.
• Admin-side cache of category lists provides a performance increase for large inventories.
• Google Analytics integration.
• Enable/disable individual products.
• Gift certificate thumbnail image
• Custom site documents - can now be set as an absolute URL
• Search engine friendly URL performance enhancements
• Miscellaneous bug fixes…

If we have any members who wish to test this version prior to release, we will be pleased to send you the latest development build from version control. Feel free to email al {at} devellion [dot] com

What is the plan after 4.1.0?
As some of you may know, we have signed up to the “GoPHP5 Initiative“. After 4.1.x we are planing to take FULL advantage of PHP5. This means CubeCart releases after 4.1 won’t be compatible with PHP4. We have lots more plans including templated admin control panel with much more consideration given towards the store owners experience.
More information regarding CubeCart and the GoPHP5 Initiative can be found on our forums.

Finally it has been released at last and we have been so overwhelmed with sales/support questions we forgot to update the blog!

v4 has generated a huge amount of interest and we are really pleased with the feedback we have received. There have been quite a few production release bugs and we have been working around the clock to resolve these. Although we are very grateful to our beta testers who did a fabulous job we have decided that next time we will have public beta testing so less will slip through the net. 4.0.1 was released soon after 4.0.0 to fix a couple of them but we will have another release available very soon.

We have also had a lot of requests for a 100% width skin which we are working to add and a number of different modules/language files. These are being prioritized in order of demand and will be released one by one through the downloads section of our website. This is much more beneficial than packaging them into v4 as they can have independent versioning.

We have already started rebuilding the admin control panel with a new skin and improved layout using xTemplate and have prioritized parts of our roadmap for 4.1.0. Existing v4 customers will be eligible to free upgrades.
Many thanks to you all for your support.

Sorry it has been such a long time since any updates we have been absolutely flat out. At the time of writing CubeCart 4.0.0 is at Beta 3 release stage and we have had incredible support from our voluntary beta testers. We have hammered most of these bugs very quickly and days have passed with no new bugs being reported at all. Hopefully our customers will find it very stable from the initial final release.

Beta 1: 92 Bugs Fixed
Beta 2: 60 Bugs Fixed
Beta 3: 43 Bugs Fixed (So far..)

Unfortunately we lost contact with out old security auditor and it has taken quite some time to find another company to do this. It is however underway now with a US based security firm who have done a lot of work for some large banks. This security audit consists of the following stages:

• Code Review and Trace-Through
• Cross-Site-Scripting (XSS) vulnerability assessment
• SQL injection vulnerability assessment
• Authentication bypass, PHP session ID, and session management security assessment
• ACL and Weak Password Testing
• Back door and debug code exploitation
• Cookie poisoning
• Cryptography security
• Form fields and hidden form field manipulation
• Validation of test plans and previous finding remediation
• Validation of CubeCart modules and their methods of exchanging data with external business partners
• Report detailing the results of the assessment and identified risk areas

Once we have the final report we will have to spend some time making any amendments to the code which *could* be substantial.

The only other barriers to release are two language files which should be delivered back from our translator agency in the next few days. I’m pleased to say v4 will come with the following default languages which have been professionally translated:

• Spanish
• French
• German
• Dutch - Awaiting Delivery
• Chinese (Simplified) - Awaiting Delivery
• Russian
• Italian
• Portuguese
• .. not forgetting English

We are also working closely with a very well known and respected payment processing company to be come a certified partner. We haven’t submit our certification submission yet but should do next week. Fingers crossed we pass! Exams never were my strong point!! In fact i think I got 14% in a university operating systems exam once. University wasn’t about studying anyway. LOL

Hmmm.. that’s it for now I think. We have already started working on features for 4.1 and I’m pleased to say that development should be a great deal faster from 4.0 onwards.

Any questions… just give me a shout.

We are in the latter stages of development now and things are all starting to tie up nicely. Below is a screen shot of the setup script which replaces the current install script. As you can see from the image it can be used to install and easily upgrade your store to the latest version. Once this is complete we will spend time looking over the entire script before putting it through some vigorous testing phases. The only other tasks left to complete are the DHL & FedEx modules. Getting a test account has proved to be next to impossible.

I’m starting to think i might be spoiling you avid readers. 2 updates in 7 days?! You lucky lucky people
We’ve just added EAN/UPC barcode features into the development version, which means you can add the barcode information for products to each product. This makes exporting the your inventory to Google Base and Shopzilla a lot easier!

This won’t be replacing the product code field, just complementing it

Martin