• NEW - January 2012 - Version 6.0.0.0 – JavaScript jQuery Plugin, LDAP, Improved SOLR and SEO... More

Ver 6.0.0.0 – What’s New?

Introduction

Version 6.0.0.0 is the first release after version 5.5.0.2 that has been made generally available. It contains many exciting new features and a number of bug fixes. Versions 5.6.0.0, 5.7.0.0, 5.7.5.0 and 5.8.0.0 have been available for supported customers and so the following lists show the changes for each version separately. Before upgrading, please read the Upgrade Compatibility Alerts for each version.

Version 6.0.0.0

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

  • Improved the KonaKart promotion subsystem (Enterprise only) by adding functionality to evaluate promotions on individual products rather than as Order Totals. This means that a customer can now visualize the details of active promotions for a product before adding it to the cart.
  • Added functionality to support product options with variable quantity (Enterprise Only). i.e. Customer can choose number of GigaBytes of extra memory for a product by entering an amount rather than choosing a fixed option.
  • The object containing payment gateway callback information has been given some extra attributes so that more information can be stored regarding the transaction type, transaction amount and custom information.
  • Added a new enableCustomer() API call and struts action to call it. This method can be used to verify a customer’s email before enabling him.
  • Added some custom relationship types in the Admin App for setting up product to product relationships.
  • Added animated gif to GWT one page checkout code to show customers that the system is waiting for data to arrive. Useful for the case when interfacing with external shipping or tax systems that may take a few seconds to respond.
  • Upgraded to new version of jTDS (v1.2.5) – for details of changes see http://jtds.sourceforge.net/
  • Upgraded to new versions of avalon-framework-api (v4.3), commons-collections (v3.2), commons-configuration (v1.7), commons-logging (v1.1), jcs (v1.3) and downgraded commons-pool (v1.3).
  • Upgraded to new version of Torque (v3.3) and Village (v3.3).
  • Removed the limit of displaying only 1000 Admin Users in the panel where the users are given roles.
  • Product Option and Option Value names have been given a max size of 64 characters and the validation length through the admin app is now configurable.
  • Added KK Engine API call, getAllPromotions(), to return all active promotions.
  • Made the Enterprise Extensions installer more robust when installing to Community Edition systems with non-default data present.
  • Added a new SQL Analysis utility (Enterprise Only) that can provide a quick overview of the SQL performance of the system.
  • Added Online Help for Reports Configuration in the Admin App.
  • When deleting a GeoZone (or “Tax Area”) using the deleteGeoZone() Admin API call, in order to maintain data integrity, any tax rates that use the specified geoZone are also deleted.
  • In the Admin App the date template is now read from the message catalog so that different languages can have different templates. Some of the dates are now shown with hour:minute precision.
  • Ability to define the default value for and/or hide the “Requires Coupon” checkbox on the Promotions panel of the Admin App using File-Based Configuration.

Bug fixes

  • Save button sometimes enabled at wrong times on Tax Classes Panel of the Admin App. A minor usability improvement.
  • Fixed bug that allowed checkout without selecting a shipping method when using the JSP checkout screens.

Backwards Compatibility Alert

  • None

Version 5.8.0.0

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

  • Introduction of a jQuery plugin enabling you to call the KK Store-Front API from JavaScript AJAX calls. The plugin uses the JSON APIs which are now available in the community version. Documentation available under the doc directory after installation.
  • Added possibility to perform faceted product searches using SOLR. The facet attributes can be defined for different types of products using the custom attribute functionality.
  • “Miscellaneous Items”, with defined “Miscellaneous Item Types” can now be associated with products and categories (Enterprise Extensions only).
  • Added 5 custom fields to the EmailOptions objects to provide greater flexibility in customizing the generation of email messages.
  • New CyberSource Hosted Order Post Payment Gateway Module.
  • Now bundled with Apache Tomcat 7.0.22 (previously bundled with 6.0.33). Note that this version of tomcat requires a minimum Java version of 1.6.
  • A new utility to create encrypted database passwords for the properties files so that they don’t have to be stored in plain text. (Enterprise Extensions only).
  • A security feature has been added for the BIRT Viewer. By default this is enabled. With this enabled it is now essential to have a valid sessionId in order to execute a report using the BIRT viewer.
  • Upgraded two apache-commons jars (to dbcp-1.4.jar and pool-1.4.jar). These provide various bug-fixes and improved JDBC support.
  • Upgraded to allow the hiding of the Edit button on the Orders panel via role-based security.
  • Allow the use of a CLOB for the custom attributes column in Oracle so that more than 4000 characters can be used for custom attributes if required.
  • Modified the order panel of the Admin App to resize automatically to fit lower resolution displays.
  • Replaced unmappable characters from CyberSource java files so that they can be compiled without warnings on platforms where UTF8 is the default encoding.
  • Added the option to hide the Print button on the Order Invoice Panel of the Admin App (using file-based configuration).
  • Now possible to rename the default store from “store1″ to another name. This is still not recommended practice but possible if required.
  • Upload button moved to a new position to allow the Manufacturer’s panel of the Admin App to fit on a smaller screen.
  • Centred Admin App dialog boxes using a different technique to place them in more central positions on all platforms.
  • Added functionality to the store-front app in order to facilitate SSO by passing customer and session information in a secure way when moving between two different applications using the same engine. i.e. A CMS system to place products in the cart and another system to checkout.
  • When inserting a product using the admin app, you can now specify hour:minute precision for the available and expiry dates.
  • When inserting a promotion using the admin app, you can now specify hour:minute precision for the start and end dates.
  • The select manufacturer and select template dialog boxes in the admin app have been given a double click handler to make a selection.
  • Added functionality in the Admin App to facilitate the maintenance of custom attributes. When custom attribute descriptions are modified or deleted, there is now the option to automatically update all of the products using the custom attribute.
  • Added last modified date as a search constraint for products in the Admin App API.
  • Added File Based Configuration parameters to the Admin App to make the title of the Edit Product panel configurable. You can now decide whether to show the product name, SKU or both.
  • Added a File Based Configuration parameter to the Admin App to make the Products panel configurable. You can now decide whether to show the product name or SKU in the first column of the array.
  • Added a RichText custom field widget to facilitate data entry for template based custom fields containing lines of text.
  • Added an API call to the store-front API to check whether a coupon exists and whether it is active.
  • Digital Downloads shipping module now installed by default.

Bug fixes

  • Modified EditAddrBody.jsp to fix bug whereby phone numbers weren’t being displayed and therefore lost when the address was edited.
  • When the Admin App is deployed to a webapp with a different name the PDF viewer failed because it was hard-coded to use “/konakartadmin”. The Admin App code now derives the webapp name dynamically.
  • Due to changes in the default treatment of escaped strings in PostgreSQL 9.1 the syntax in the database loading scripts (konakart_demo.sql etc) has been modified. Previously the regular expression loaded for the sample custom attribute for date recognition was being imported incorrectly into PostgreSQL 9.1. For users of earlier versions of KonaKart, this can be fixed by running the database upgrade scripts.
  • In the Admin App, invisible products weren’t being displayed after having been added as a merchandising link (up sell, cross sell etc.) or as a promotion rule.
  • A race condition has been fixed which sometimes caused the deletion of all merchandising links (i.e. Up Sell) to a product when only attempting to delete one.
  • When a product is saved, the merchandising drop list in the merchandising panel, no longer resets to “Up Sell”. It keeps the current selection.
  • The Category panel in the Admin App wasn’t counting invisible products in the number of products per category.
  • Modified encoding for the directory structure SEO URLs in order to remove encoded forward and backward slashes which are not allowed by some app servers for security reasons. Any forward and backward slashes in product, manufacturer or category names are converted to dashes “-” in the SEO URL.
  • Increased the size of the products_name attribute in the orders_products table to 256 to match the products_name in the products_description table.
  • Updated MyProductMgr.java (in apiexamples) to reflect the latest method signatures.
  • Fixed admin app bug when viewing products for manufacturers. The manufacturer constraint wasn’t being set properly when filtering the search results with more constraints.
  • The formatting of hour:minute in the edit product panel of the Admin App has been modified to always show two digits for hour and two for minute. The modification affects the definition of special price start and end dates as well as bookable product time slots.
  • The option to delete products when deleting a manufacturer or a category, wasn’t deleting invisible products.

Backwards Compatibility Alert

  • With the introduction of tomcat 7 there is now a requirement to use a minimum java version of 1.6 (previously we supported Java 1.5 and above).
  • The JSON APIs are now “switched on” after a default installation. The web.xml file of the konakart webapp must be edited in order to disable them.

Version 5.7.5.0

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

  • SOLR searches now return facets for categories and manufacturers so that the search results can be filtered using this information.
  • Enhanced product search to enable searching for products in multiple categories and for multiple manufacturers.
  • Added a new mode for formatting URLs for SEO. The standard format for URLs is now a directory structure containing the SEO data rather than extra attributes.
  • Provide access by default to the Velocity EscapeTool to escape output from your Velocity templates (for emails, orders etc).
  • Improved functionality of the getRelatedProductsWithOptions() API call of the Application Engine. The improvement is to allow to invert the direction of the related product link. This is especially useful for bundled products, so rather than discovering the products within a bundle, you can determine which bundles a product belongs to.
  • Automatic redirect to konakart webapp when the http://localhost:8780/ is used.
  • Upgrade of SOLR. KonaKart is now shipped with SOLR 3.4.0.
  • Modified updateOrderStatus() API call of Admin App to allow status change using the same status.
  • Enterprise Source pack now places the relevant Enterprise-only source files under the custom directory for easier custom ANT building.
  • Include the import and export of product tags in the XML_IO utility.
  • Allow the definition of translations of module names so that they can be viewed in the currently-selected language in the Admin App.
  • Drop lists for promotion types and order statuses are now populated with entries in the currently-selected language in the Admin App.
  • Increased the size of the category name to 256 characters.
  • Provide more flexibility in defining localisations with the introduction of several new Admin App message properties that can be defined for each language.

Bug fixes

  • The GetBestSellers API call of the App Engine wasn’t returning the special price of a product.
  • Allow more than one store to be cloned at the same time.
  • Admin App fix to prevent Administrators accessing the kk_store records of stores they are not authorised to access.
  • Fix for the Admin App when installing the LDAP module on Oracle when it is the only “Other” module installed.
  • Fixed encoding problem when uploading images from the admin app with double byte character names. The name of the image on the file system wasn’t being set correctly.
  • When registering / checking out using the one page checkout GWT code the default country in the drop list was not being set to the store country in some browsers.

Backwards Compatibility Alert

  • None

Version 5.7.0.0

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

  • New CyberSource Payment gateway
  • New WorldPay XML Redirect Payment gateway
  • New Free Gift Order Total Module.
  • Added custom fields to order totals.
  • Now bundled with Apache Tomcat 6.0.33 (previously bundled with 6.0.18)
  • Changes some struts action classes to do a 301 redirect rather than 302 when adding SEO data to the URLs.
  • Added an attribute to Order to keep track of who created the order. It is automatically set when logging in to the store-front app as an admin user and creating an order.
  • Use version number in GWT nocache.js files to ensure GWT applications (Admin App and components in the Storefront) are updated by browsers after upgrading to new versions.
  • Ability to define the default value for and/or hide the “Use Customer Language” checkbox on the Customer Communications panel of the Admin App using File-Based Configuration.
  • Modified testDB() API call of Admin App to not return the database connection string and database user. The API call remains backwards compatible but only returns information to determine whether a DB connection can be made.
  • If present, use the Order Number for the Invoice Filename rather than the internal Order Id.

Bug fixes

  • One page checkout new customer registration fixed
  • Engine was throwing an exception when retrieving a wish list for a temporary customer containing a disabled or nonexistent product.
  • Change language wasn’t working properly for the admin app when running within a Liferay Portlet.

Backwards Compatibility Alert

  • None

Version 5.6.0.0

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

  • LDAP module to connect to an LDAP directory in order to validate customer and admin user credentials.
  • In Admin app can now search for orders based on customer name, email and postcode in order to search for orders for non registered customers.
  • Added the ability to add custom business objects to the Velocity context to make these available for your Velocity templates.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed bug when inserting coupons using the admin app. The times_used attribute was getting set to the value of the coupon selected before the insert.
  • In the TaxAreaMapping panel of the Admin App, the Search and Clear buttons were overlapping the border of the search panel in Chrome and FireFox.
  • Wrapped the manufacturer name in CDATA when sending a product to the SOLR search engine to avoid having to encode certain characters within the manufacturer name such as the ampersand character.
  • Fixed bug in multi-store non shared customers mode. In some cases the categories weren’t being displayed in the categories tab of the edit product panel.
  • The Change Language functionality of the admin app wasn’t working correctly when the file based configuration property was set so that the password is never stored in a temporary cookie.
  • A fix for the “controversial” new deferred segment creation feature introduced into Oracle 11gR2 (Enterprise Only). Installations failed with this db with the default setting of DEFERRED_SEGMENT_CREATION=TRUE. Now our Oracle scripts set DEFERRED_SEGMENT_CREATION=FALSE on the session to ensure that the installation runs as required.

Backwards Compatibility Alert

  • None