X-Cart forums - X-Cart 4.x roadmap

Hi xcarters,

Here is the roadmap for the next year for our v4 platform.

We believe that our main mission for the v4 platform is to provide the existing customer base with the up to date integrations and features that will enable them to succeed in the highly competitive market of today. We understand that for some merchants an upgrade may be too expensive, and we will need to offer them a cheaper way to get the new features. So, there won’t be a lot of major changes for XC4 merchants. If an XC4 merchant wants a level up with technologies and ecommerce experience and is ready to invest into the migration and adoption, we recommend that they upgrade to the X-Cart 5 platform
(Check out the roadmap for X-Cart 5).

Integration with segment.com

We’ve already included this integration in our plans for version 5. As soon as we collect the initial feedback from the users of XC5, we will implement it for the XC4 platform.

Segment is the universal glue to integrate your website with almost any useful service on the web. You can see the list of their integrations here: https://segment.com/integrations

With Segment integration, our merchants will be able to import data into all these services. This solution will provide our merchants with a set of very powerful tools to increase sales and conversion, analyse data, make reports, follow up with customers and partners, work with search engines and so on.

As a result, all the existing merchants on the XC4 platform will be able to integrate their store with the most popular online services with just a few clicks.

Close all open bug reports

There is no bug free software. You know it. But our challenge for 2016 year is to make the software with no known bugs. All this year our dev team have been working hard on the issues reported via the bugtracker, and we have closed about 60% of the known issues. We are planning to “shoot down” the remaining issues during the next year.

We expect that XC4 merchants who will upgrade to the coming new versions will get the most stable platform they have ever used.

Improvements of UI/UX

Our customers prefer to use their existing front-end design and adapt to the current market requirements. That’s why we will start to replace certain input fields and widgets to update the UI/UX for the customer storefront and the admin area. The date-range picker in the admin area, the category picker-widget and so on - all these inputs based on the HTML4 technology are useless on tablets and look too old. We will replace them with widgets based on HTML5/JS/CSS3.

As a result the merchants will get the advantages of the new technologies with the ability to adapt their existing design to the latest versions.

Improved mobile experience

The mobile audience continues to grow, and we need to make sure that our merchants are ready for the mobile age. We already have a responsive template certified by Google. We want to make sure that the mobile skin provides the best selling experience for the end buyers, so we will continue to work on that.

Also, XC4 merchants are welcome to use the mobile app to manage the store - http://www.x-cart.com/extensions/modules/mobileadmin.html

Adaptation of the existing integrations

The v4 platform has a lot of integrations with 3d party services. Most of these services improve their API every year, and we need to make sure that X-Cart is up to date on these improvements. DHL, USPS, SagePay, PayPal and so on.

We want to make sure that our customers can use these 3d party services to the fullest, and we will invest a lot of resources into this challenge.

New features

X-Cart 4 has tons of features, but we are not planning to stop at that. We will continue to improve our best selling product. For the next year we will concentrate on the features that will help X-Cart merchants to increase sales, promote conversion, save time on the management routine and integrate with 3d party services that are recognized as leaders in their areas (like Avalara for professional tax management or MailChimp for professional email marketing).

Upgrade minimum requirements to PHP 5.4 and MySQL 5.1 in X-Cart v4.8

PHP 4.x and 5.3 are outdated, and it is not secure to continue using these versions. We will make sure that v4 works perfectly on PHP 5.4-5.6 and MySQL 5.1-5.7. We will also upgrade the minimum requirements to php 5.4 and mysql 5.1.

We would prefer to name PHP 5.5 the minimum required version, but we understand that most of the hosting companies will continue using the older versions in the nearest future, so it is going to be just 5.4 this time.

This change will require a major update to 4.8.

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So, those are our plans for the next year, and we want to discuss them with the community. Please feel free to share your ideas and thoughts here.