• NEW - Version 5.0.0.0 – Reward Points, Recurring Billing, PDF Invoices ... Read more

Ver 5.0.0.0 - What’s new ?

Introduction

Version 5.0.0.0 is the first release after version 4.2.0.1 that has been made generally available. It contains many exciting new features and a number of bug fixes. Before upgrading, please read the Upgrade Compatibility Alert below.

Version 5.0.0.0

Note that some of the features highlighted below are only available in the Enterprise Extensions. See here for full details of what is included only in the Enterprise Extensions.

New Features

  • Reward point functionality has been added so that customers can be awarded points for buying products, registering, writing reviews etc. These points can be redeemed during the checkout process and a customer can view a statement of his recent point transactions after logging in. An administrator can manage a customer’s points.
  • Support for recurring billing. Payment Schedule and Subscription objects have been introduced to support recurring billing natively using a KonaKart batch or through a payment gateway that manages the billing process at regular intervals.
  • Invoices can now be created in PDF format and can also be attached to order confirmation emails. Invoices can also be viewed from both the storefront application and the Admin App.
  • Added a number of extra custom attributes to the product object including integers and decimals. All fields can be used for searching and sorting. Expiry date has also been added.
  • Added extra telephone numbers and eMail addresses to the billing and shipping addresses. These new attributes are visible to the address formatter.
  • The language of the store front application is saved in a cookie so that even non logged in customers return to the application in their preferred language.
  • Added a locale attribute to customers and orders to allow emails, especially from the admin app to be sent out in the correct language rather than the default store language.
  • WYSIWYG editor added to the Admin App for editing product descriptions.
  • Upgraded to Google GWT 2.0
  • Added search rules for searching for products and other objects through the application and admin app APIs. The rules allow you to easily define whether and where, wild cards should be added. The admin app has a new properties file where default wild card settings can be defined for the various panels within the admin app.
  • Added a refresh button to the reports panel of the Admin App
  • If a logging properties file isn’t found on the classpath, rather than giving a null exception, KonaKart now initializes the log4j system with a set of default logging properties.
  • Country objects returned by the getAllCountries() API call are now fully populated.
  • Eclipse project supplied for customizing the One Page Checkout GWT code
  • Now possible to set the first day of the week on the Calendar Popup widget to a chosen day.
  • Made it possible to internationalize the few remaining aspects of the Admin App. To take advantage of these you will have to update your AdminMessages_XX.properties file for your own locales.
  • Now possible for a customer to use a gift certificate and a promotion code at the same time.
  • Added new Struts Validator to the store-front application to avoid XSS injection during the submission of forms.
  • Added a drop list and upload button to the customer communications panel of the Admin App to allow you to select templates and upload new ones. The templates are now stored in a different directory for each store in a multi-store environment.
  • Modified the Edit Product panel in the Admin App to make it easier and more intuitive to upload images. Also added upload button for digital downloads.
  • Improved I18N for the Admin App to allow decimal numbers such as prices to be inserted using other characters as a decimal point. i.e. a comma.
  • Added order number to the returns panel of the admin app to allow you to search for returns based on the order number and not just the order id.
  • Added a configuration variable in order to automatically enable a product when its quantity is changed to a value greater than 0 through the admin app API.
  • Upgraded to version 1.4 of Solr.
  • A new mode of operation is available for the Edit Customer panel of the Admin App to allow you to define that certain roles may edit only “external” customer details. This is useful for the cases where customers are actually managed outside of KonaKart. It makes it possible for the Admin User to edit only the Customer Group, the Newsletter subscription, the state (enabled/disabled) and the customer type (admin/customer/default).
  • Added a configuration variable that controls whether customer Ids are displayed on the edit customer panel. Customer Ids are now shown as floatover text on the Customers Panel.
  • New eWay Australia payment gateway module added.
  • Product importer/exporter modified to import and export using UTF-8 encoding.
  • Improvements to the installer - automatic discovery of current java environment improved and extra validation to check the selected java runtime environment is valid.

Bug fixes - Application

  • Added a timestamp to paging links to avoid paging expired result sets that may be accessed by using the browser back button.
  • Fixed a bug when searching for products using Solr. Products under multiple categories being searched for “by category” were not being found.

Bug fixes - Admin App

  • Links on the right hand side of the status page weren’t working.
  • edit review and delete review links on Edit Product panel weren’t working

Backwards Compatibility Alert

  • The velocity templates are no longer stored directly under the WEB-INF/classes directory. They are now stored under the installation home directory in a /templates/store_id/ directory structure where store_id is the id of the store and defaults to store1 in a single store environment. It is possible to move these to any other location so long as you update the TEMPLATE_BASE_DIRECTORY to point at the new location.
  • In addition to moving the velocity templates, they are all (those from the konakart and konakartadmin webapps) now grouped together in the same location. This resulted in a conflict of names where the EmailNewPassword_en.vm existed in both the konakart and the konakartadmin webapps. Therefore the one from konakartadmin has been renamed to be EmailNewPasswordAdmin_en.