thirty bees 1.0.2-beta.1

This week we originally wanted to release 1.0.2 without a beta, but after we looked back at what has changed, we have decided to first release a beta version. On GitHub you can see that there are hardly any files that have been left untouched: https://github.com/thirtybees/thirtybees/compare/1.0.1…1.0.x

Why are there so many changes, you might ask? The first and foremost reason to fork the other software was to fix bugs. Not only were there a lot of bugs, there was a lot of so-called technical debt as well. This means that we have not only worked on adding new features and improving the software by fixing bugs, but in the meantime we have also had to do something about the technical debt. For this we have documented and rewritten the numerous functions, reduced PHP compatibility (incl. extensions), introduced composer, a new code style and more standardization. This took a lot of time and has resulted in a lot of changes. As always these changes can come with the necessary regressions, so for this version we are going to take a lot of time, to make sure that all the changes are tested well and we have another release that is going to help us merchants (yes, I’m a merchant, too) make it to the top!

Bug reports

Thank you very much for all the bug reports in the past couple months! It makes me really proud to see such a strong community already in this early phase of the software. Really, thank you!
This of course does not go unnoticed and shows that you find stable e-commerce software equally important as we do and I’m glad to say that we have processed almost all (reproducable) bug reports.

What has changed?

Good question! A lot. We have tried to keep track of most of the issues on GitHub, but some of you report issues on the forum as well. Note that GitHub issues get a higher priority and have a lower chance of being forgotten, because it is much much easier to keep track of them via the issue tab, milestones and whatnot: https://github.com/thirtybees/thirtybees/milestone/4?closed=1

CSV importer

Together with alwayspaws I have found a lot of bugs in the new CSV importer and solved them like a maniac. If there are any left let us know via GitHub. Her CSV files were huge and included a lot of information, so this was a real test for thirty bees. Unfortunately it failed at the time, but 1.0.2 will do much better. Guaranteed. I would like to thank alwayspaws for telling me all the details she could find and help improve thirty bees. We are very grateful!

Currency format

We have noticed on the forum that the currency format was a hot, a very hot issue. We have changed the currency formatter to use CLDR data, but this was not a very popular change among many of you. Therefore we have added a switch to the currency page that can revert a currency to the previous behavior:

Disable auto formatting of a currency

Clean URLs

Many of you have reported that the brand-new Clean URLs system doesn’t always work as intended. Our apologies for that! It should be improved a lot with 1.0.2:

URL rewrites

Product customizations

An old bug with product customizations has been fixed. If you add multiple products with customizations they should now be shown properly in the cart:

Product customizations

Discounts

We have added a lot of fixes for discounts. The table on the discount page of the customer portal should now be fully working again. Another issue with specific price rules (catalog price rules) and taxes has also been taken care of, although it comes with a few notes: thirtybees/thirtybees#264

PayPal

We have forked the PayPal module and have rewritten about 80% of the code. Despite that we noticed that the remaining 20% didn’t behave properly. In order to fix the old rounding and item list problems with PayPal we have changed the way the module calculates the cart and total. It should now be better in sync with thirty bees. The reason why this is so hard to keep synchronized is that thirty bees and PayPal apply methods that are exactly each opposites, so we had to be smart and find something that could please both system. It looks like we have succeeded. Let us know if we haven’t! More information can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/thirtybees/paypal/releases/tag/5.2.0

Right to left languages

Thanks to Yaniv Mirel (thank you very much!) we can now enjoy much better support for RTL languages.

thirty bees updater

At the moment the beta update is not available via the updater. This was on purpose. We do not want you to upgrade in a hurry and test the new version on your current store. It is a beta version and things will break. However, feel free to test on your local development environment. We have locked the database schema, so all you have to do for an update is copy the new files over the old ones, update the version number in /config/settings.inc.php and thirty bees should be updated.