Dear nopCommerce community!
We are most pleased to introduce the BETA version 3.80 of nopCommerce for the community testing. The official release of this version is planned in two weeks, but we want you to test it in advance and share some feedback with us. The main changes that we implemented were aimed at making nopCommerce more store owners and store managers oriented. We wanted to ease the work with the platform for different types of users: from beginner merchants to experienced managers. Making it happen, we focused on UI and UX and simplified and re-designed admin area.
Firstly we re-designed the product details page, which was very long and required much scrolling. We made two modes for this page: "basic" and "advanced" (a store owner can choose which settings will be displayed in "basic" mode).
For the setting pages we've chosen the most widely used (minimum list) and made them visible in "Basic" mode. By clicking the switch button, the page can be set to "Advanced" mode which shows all available settings.
The menu is optimized so the menu items can be easily found in the search field. The dashboard can be modified to show only reports the store owner needs. The admin area now has responsive design and is viewable on all mobile devices, enabling store management on-the-go.
And there are a lot of other enhancements done as part of this task
The other highlights for this version include:
• Usage of several discounts simultaneously (cumulative discounts).
• "Color square" specification attribute type (allow filtering by this type on catalog pages).
• Conditional checkout attributes.
• Added new product attribute type - Image squares. It's very similar to "color squares" attribute type. But allows a store owner can upload pictures instead of choosing of colors. Attribute value images make it more clear to the customer what they are choosing.
• Allow a store owner to configure custom RMA# (return request number).
• Better "in-store pickup" support. Allow a store owner to configure (and a customer to choose) pickup locations.
• "Ship to the same address" checkbox to the "Billing address" step during checkout (configurable - disabled by default).
You can find the full release notes here
We'd love if developers could get involved with testing to find any issues which will need fixing before the final release.
In order to download nopCommerce 3.80 BETA please use the following links:
BETA 3.80 - Source code (download if you are a web developer interested in the nopCommerce application source code)
BETA 3.80 - No source code (download this package if you want to deploy a live site to a web server with the minimum required files)
Upgrade script from 3.70 (download this package to upgrade an existing installation to a newer version)
But our thoughts on user experience are nothing without the opinion of real users. So after visiting our new admin area we ask you to leave your thoughts in this forum topic. Thank you!