Right now we are spending time looking at how the admin panel of CubeCart currently works and what we can do to improve it.
We appreciate that product and orders need to be found quickly and as easily as possible. Important decisions need to be made as to whether the admin user is returned to the item listing page on “add item” or sent to the edit page for confirmation.
What do you think? What things annoy you the most about the way the admin interface currently operates? Time = Money
The winners have been picked and it has taken hours to read over all of your comments and suggestions. I don’t want to give away too much as a great deal of the data is very precious and we certainly don’t want our competitors to see it.
The majority of those surveyed took the time to leave comments, some funny, some out right weird but maily all very useful indeed. We were most pleased by the fact that almost nothing that was sugested wasn’t already implemented, in the process of being implemented or on our whiteboard for a future release. The same suggestions and comments appeared time after time and it was really very humbling to see that over the last six months or so we have already been very much on the ball and there is absolutely no doubt that we are heading in the right direction.
In summary we found that the overwhelming majority of our customers are happy with CubeCart and the vast majority would recommend it to their aquantances and use it for future projects.
The survey is now closed but we will still enjoying hearing from you. We would like to take this opportunity to thank old, new and potential customers for their support and for sparing your valuable time to complete the survey.
We talk to our customers on the phone every day, we read forum posts and emails all the time where we come across wonderful suggestions, ideas and sometimes even complaints too. 
We listen and acknowledge your ideas which have been the main input to our development roadmap which is long, detailed and exciting! Our main tool for prioritising this input is straightforward. Each time suggestions and requirements are asked of us the likelihood of it happening sooner than later increases.
In an attempt to learn even more about our customers and to discover what you like and dislike about our products and services we have created a short survey. We appreciate that there is a huge amount of competition around us and we are determined to keep one step ahead. To arrogantly sit back and assume we know what you want would be dangerous, not only for our company but yours too. In order for our customers CubeCart stores to remain competitive it is vital that CubeCart remains innovative.
We all hate filling in forms so as an incentive some Amazon gift vouchers have been offered to 14 randomly selected. Good luck!
For more information about the competition and to take the survey please visit our forums announcement:
http://forums.cubecart.com/index.php?showtopic=37659&pid=162366&st=0&#entry162366
Recently there has been some discussion about PayPal Express Checkout in CubeCart v4. In particular some merchants are concerned that on return from Authorization at PayPal the customer may be muddled as to what to do next.
A small tweak can be made to your store files to improve this so that a message is displayed to your customer that grabs their attention on return to complete their order.
To implement this please open inlcudes/content/cart.inc.php and find at around line 214:
$lang = getLang(”includes”.CC_DS.”content”.CC_DS.”gateway.inc.php”);
$view_cart->assign(”LANG_CHECKOUT_BTN”,$lang['gateway']['continue']);
Under this and add:
$view_cart->parse(”view_cart.cart_true.paypal_pro_notice”);
Save and upload back to your server.
Next please open skins/{skin in use}/styleTemplates/content/cart.tpl and find at about line 17:
<!– BEGIN: cart_true –>
Under this add something like:
<p class=’txtError’>Thank you! Authorization to take payment for this order has been made successfully via PayPal. To complete the order and make payment please click the "Make Payment" button below.</p>
Hopefully this will lower the amount of abandoned orders and your sales will soar.
CubeCart v4 is still growing and sales are as strong as ever. Luckily e-commerce is one of the few industries that still experiences growth in poor global economic conditions but it is really sad to see large high street names close their doors. As I’m sure most of us will agree, it’s going to be a bit of a long haul recovery.
A great deal of development is going on for a new major release of CubeCart. A minor release of v4 should be available in the coming months too. As we don’t want to give everything away, teasers, updates and screenshots may be few and far between now. We do however read all your suggestion and carefully consider all of them. Some people may think that not much is going on but that would be far from the truth. I can hear one of our developers using unrepeatable words concerning Rijndael encrypted cache files and I type!!
Right now we have a talented in house designer whose job is to create new CubeCart skins. Much of his work has been for large industry names such as T-Mobile, Nokia, Nikon, BWM, etc… so the look and feel of future CubeCart releases should be in a whole new league. We plan to have five new skins, some with colour sub-themes. In v4 for example this would make Caretta Soft & Caretta Bright one skin with two style-sheets. We are also improving the flexibility of skins by having the ability for them to have their own config files, on the fly thumbnail generation and as many different thumbnail sizes as you wish. (Bye, bye unnecessary thumbnail tool). This overcomes problems encountered when designing skins concerning fixed thumbnail sizes and amount of latest products etc…
Of course I am sure we will have a barrage of emails asking for release dates and questions concerning whether there will be an upgrade fee or not. Regrettably we are unable to answer such questions at this time, so please try to refrain from asking. Although we have a huge and incredibly loyal customer base there is a huge amount of competition out there now. We are not arrogant and most certainly don’t take our success for granted but we are positive and determined to be a leader in the market with innovative, flexible, robust and affordable e-commerce solutions.
We thought it was about time we posted some development updates.
CubeCart 4.3.0 is soon to be released. This version has undergone a thorough anual security audit and we have implemented some security hardening features such as password salts. FCKEditor has been updated to the latest incarnation which fixes some of the bugs in newer browser versions and now supports Safari & Google Chrome. We are also talking with recapcha.net to add an option for their visual/audio captcha system. This should not only improve security but improve accessibility for those with little or no sight.
A great deal of development is going on in the background too for a later more major release. Below are a few more sneak peaks.
Simple Contact Us Manager
We have created a simple contact us for customers to use on the front end of the site. It allows you to specify departments with corresponding email addresses. It is also possible to use the rich text editor to add other information such as your address and any other information you want to show such as business hours.
Sales Statistics
The long awaited feature to have sales reports has been made. This is a useful tool to generate general sale / tax reports within a user defined time period. It can be displayed as an HTML table or exported as a CSV file. Right now we are investigating the possibility of integrating 3rd party software such as Quickbook although no development has started on that yet.
That’s about all we have to show for now but there is lots of other development including digital downloads manager. Hopefully we will have more to show soon.
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 PHP4’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.
