nopCommerce 2.65 and 2.70 roadmap

We've prepared a draft of the roadmap for the next version of nopCommerce (2.70). It doesn't contain any major features because all development efforts will be focused on improving existing functionality/performance/usability, refactoring, fixing bugs, and making nopCommerce more pluggable.

You can find all existing work items for version 2.65 here and for version 2.70 here.

By the way, have a look at this forum topic (the survey results). I think we'll start working on multi-store and multi-vendor support very soon (in several months). It's not for sure, but 99%. "Better CMS support" task is also demanded. Other features were voted as "Nice to have - but not essential". So they'll be implemented later.

Your thoughts?



UPDATE 1: An intermediate version (2.65) of nopCommerce was released because of an issue in FluentValidation described here and here. In brief, the previous version FluentValidation library (and hence nopCommerce) does not work on servers with ASP.NET 4.5 installed. It should be done as soon as possible because many servers (on shared hosting) will be upgraded to ASP.NET 4.5 in the near time.



UPDATE 2: Now after version 2.65 has been released we have the new updated roadmap for version 2.70. Please find it here. Estimate release time - the end of December (it's better to have a new release each 3-4 months). A lot of new work items has been added to it. This roadmap contains the following highlight features:
- Better CMS support
- Further performance optimization
- Support ID-less urls
- ACL on Categories
- ACL on Products
- Create a new modern public store default theme
- Improve affiliate support
- Allow developers to REPLACE certain blocks of a page with their own widgets
- And a lot of minor enhancements

UPDATE 3: Version 2.70 will be released in the beginning of December. Almost everything that was on its roadmap is implemented. A couple of tasks are postponed. A "new modern public store default theme" will be published as a separate package after 2.70 (please find more info here). After it's fully tested, it'll be added into the next official package (version 2.80). BETA testers are welcome!

Nice to have this. Thanks Andrie. Will love to see 2.70 with much better performance.

I think at this stage multi-store is the need of the hour if we want to tap the large enterprise stores. Plus ID less URL will be a great plus in SEO ranking. Talking of SEO the Dev Team should also add better "Social Networking" integration out-of-the-box as I was really surprised to read this Article

The Death Of SEO: The Rise of Social, PR, And Real Content

appreciate nop team can consider to implement:

1. plugins: more flexible to allow developers create more plugins.
example 1:
there are 2 plugins A and B from different vendors(developers), both A and B have changed the original ShoppingCartService, now shop owner can't use 2 plugins at same time because B maybe override A and vice-versa.

example 2:
i want to create a plugin to generate watermark but now i can't because i may override existing DLLs.

2. in admin area, allow shop owner directly install plugins without downloading to local then FTP to hosting, the plugins should get intalled by connecting to a "plugin" server and retrieve necessary files, shop owner can directly make payment for plugins as well.

3. make checkout process more pluggable, shop owner can customize the checkout flow by change settings or plugins, no code change and compilation should be involved.

I have added my comments to the discussion about Better CMS support.

http://nopcommerce.codeplex.com/workitem/9753

MultiStore & Azure support also performance improvements. I think it is most important tasks

paul.g wrote:

Agreed except MultiStore, I believe that before adding new features. NopCommerce should have best performance out of the box. Then definitely multistore need to be added.

jariwalakrunal wrote:

Agree.
Performance is always important.

i would love to see an easier way such as checkboxes to select or deselect items for publishing etc all at once, particularly in the countries section of the configuration, but also site wide as it can be a slow process having edit / unpublish / save then move to a new item to repeat the process.

definately looking forward to nop 2.70 !

tnx

nopDev wrote:

The database seems to be the biggest performance bottleneck esp. on limited hardware.

Maybe we can do something revolutionary and instead of sql server use RavenDB.

RavenDB is a transactional document database written in C#.
It's very very fast. It's easy to use, does not require a lot of server resources.
It's schema free so we can store products as is (no mapping needed, no extra tables
to define attributes) It feels like a perfect fit for nopCommerce

For more info: ravendb.net