What's new in nopCommerce 4.40

Today our team feels proud and relieved at the same time: after 10 months of hard work, we officially release nopCommerce 4.40. We implemented an enormous list of new Enterprise functionality! Also, our development efforts were focused on moving nopCommerce, one of the top headless eCommerce platforms, to ASP.NET Core 5.0, performance improvements, and scalability.

Read on to find out about the main changes in nopCommerce 4.40.

Upgrade to .NET 5

As you may know, we always try to follow the newest technology trends and give our users the best experience. Today, .NET 5 is the next version of .NET Core and the future of the .NET platform. And now, nopCommerce uses the latest and primary version of .NET Core.

We recommend that you upgrade your website to nopCommerce 4.40 and start using .NET 5 now. This will make your website much faster and more secure.

Significant performance enhancement. Async methods

The previous version of nopCommerce (4.30) was already high-speed. But this version is way faster. We've implemented a bunch of performance changes. And you already know that ASP.NET Core in .NET 5 already speeds up the performance a lot. But the most important and significant performance change in nopCommerce 4.40 is asynchronous methods. It’s been one of the most demanded and long-awaited tasks. So now all methods in nopCommerce are async.

We also refactored and optimized the performance of Redis implementation.

Just to summarize – our tests showed about a 30% increase in performance. That's quite a lot!

Full web farm support

A web farm is a group of two or more web servers that host multiple application instances. When requests from visitors arrive in a web farm, a load balancer distributes the requests to the web farm's nodes. Web farms improve availability, performance, scalability, maintainability

There are several ways to configure load balancing in nopCommerce:

1. You use cloud-based auto-scaling appliances like Microsoft's Azure Web Apps. nopCommerce supports this scenario since version 3.70
2. You configure load balancing with IIS web farms. Now, nopCommerce fully supports web farms. Please read more about it here.

Multi-factor authentication

Multi-factor authentication (also known as two-factor authentication) is an extra layer of protection used to ensure online accounts' security beyond just emails and passwords.

It provides stronger security by requiring a second step of verification when you log in. In addition to your password, you'll also need a code generated by the Google Authenticator app on your phone.

Considering the pluggable architecture of nopCommerce, it can also be easily extended to support verification by email or SMS.

More user-friendly AJAX filters

One of the most demanded features is now available out of the box. AJAX filters allow browsing of catalog pages without reloading the whole page, enhancing the user experience and reducing response time and server load. Products will be loaded immediately when your customers navigate your catalog or when they filter products by price range or by attributes.

PostgreSQL database support

You can use nopCommerce with PostgreSQL (also known as Postgres). It's a free and open-source database management system. Today, it's one of the most popular databases in the world.

So now, nopCommerce supports three databases out of the box - MS SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. And nopCommerce users have more options to launch a store at a minimum cost.

Pre-configuration of a store during installation

Now you can specify your country when installing a new store. In this case, our store will be pre-configured based on a selected country. nopCommerce will automatically download an appropriate language pack (that could also be downloaded and installed manually from this page). It'll also pre-configure regional settings such as currencies, measures, dimensions, VAT, PAngV, etc.

"First steps" (get started) wizard for the admin area

Now it's much easier for store owners to get started with nopCommerce. When a store owner visits the admin area, we show how to set up the store fast and easily. The new wizard describes the most critical settings for an online shop. With our tips on each page, you will see how clear this process is. The wizard guides you on how to personalize your store, enter store details, set up shipping and payments, set up taxes and email accounts, add the first product, and edit any other important information

You will be ready to start selling immediately after you go through these steps.

There are also lots of other improvements and changes. Please find the full list of changes in the new version in the release notes.

You can download nopCommerce 4.40 here.

We would be happy to get your feedback about 4.40. Please share it in this forum post. And It would be great if you could share the news about the 4.40 version on your Twitter and Facebook accounts (please use hashtag #nopCommerce).