nopCommerce 3.30 roadmap and estimated release date. Let's discuss.

Hi folks,

I've prepared a draft of the roadmap for the next version of nopCommerce (3.30). Here are some of the most interesting ones:

- Custom customer attributes
- Make the default theme responsive
- Product and checkout attribute custom validation rules
- Moving to Kendo UI (Telerik MVC Extensions development is dropped by Telerik team)
- Web farm support (postponed)
- Paid Registrations (postponed)
- Rental products (postponed)
- Further performance optimization.
- And a lot of other enhancements.

You can find all existing work items for this version here

Estimate release time - April 2014 (the beginning of April)

Your thoughts or sugestions?

By the way, have a look at this work item ("Make the default theme responsive"). What do you think about it? Should it be done out of the box? If yes, should we maintain both mobile versions (a new responsive and the current jQuery mobile)? Or drop should we drop the current jQuery mobile support in order to keep the solution more simple (no code duplicates) and have only responsive one?

I think we should make it responsive out of the box and drop the jquery mobile version. This is the current trend of the market. More and more of the themes that are available for nop are also going that way, so it renders the jquery mobile version useless anyway.

Hi there,

I think we need to mature Warehouse/shipping support and Inventory Control.  The warehouse support in 3.2 is a good step forward, but with 3.3, we have a great opportunity to round out the remaining functions.  Key scenarios where a single product can exist in multiple warehouses (1 to many relationship) are needed.  Example, Company has 2 warehouses, and a product exists with quantity x in 1 location, quantity y in another.  Person orders the product, we can leverage the new function "use warehouse as shipping origin", but we can also pick the warehouse that offers the cheapest method.  In the parts world, this is just a constant scenario and excludes nop from being considered.
Additionally, there is a couple work items in shipping (9879, 7717)... I don't believe the later is tagged for 3.3 yet.  Essentially these work items are pretty clear, we want to be able to drop ship parts from multiple warehouses to multiple addresses.  eg. Corp car shop orders for their dealers...they order 5 kits, and want 3 to go 1 location and 2 to go to another, but do this in 1 order.
The Inventory Control section would be to give shop owners greater control over pricing.  ie. If I have 5 quantities of product x, 3 in 1 warehouse, 2 in another, and I know that the quality of 1 product is degraded (scratched, etc)... need to drop the price of that 1 copy of the product and not affect the other 4 quantities of the product.  This might work well with a new condition table mapping for product with a percent reduction value.
Unrelated to the above notes, I really hope 11651 can get added to 3.3.

SilhouetteBS wrote:

I agree. :)

It would be awesome to have a referral program (different from affiliate program).

I created a work item here: https://nopcommerce.codeplex.com/workitem/11864

ChuckR wrote:
A while back (2.65), I did some custom work for a client.  I created a Supplier entity (one product can have one or more suppliers).  Also included a "Picking list" PDF; on Orders list page, the store owner could select one or more open orders, and the picklist would print with separate pages per supplier.  (Picking list was also available on the individual order page).
I can contribute some code if this is the desired path.

For work item More advanced promotion price calculations..., please consider "Discount Calculation Method" plugins.

SilhouetteBS wrote:

Agree, I vote for bootstrap

New York wrote:

Very interesting. Something like this would work well I believe.  Andrey, looking forward to your input on this.  Bridging these gaps would be a big win for nop and allow the platform to become possible in industries like auto parts (among others) where same part(product) from multiple suppliers, multiple warehouses to split up quantity for storage is common.

New York - Do you have a demo of this somewhere to look at? If so, we can create a new feature topic and discuss.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I think the current one page checkout is prohibitively complex to work with. Its just an Ajaxified multistep process. I get the Ajax firing on selections to update calculations, but when the user has to click continue, all you are saving is the page load of a page which isn't very data intensive to begin with! I think consolidating the view model and validation would improve the maintainability and evolution of the checkout moving forward.

I don't think JQuery mobile support should be dropped. Responsive is one thing, but don't go to sleep in the touch controls. As far as I am aware, any half decent grid system could be made either fixed or responsive pretty easily.