What happens to the subcategories.tpl, I checked this file trying to fix the right-border overflowed subcategory page, look at here at http://www.x-cart.com/demo_preview/home.php?cat=3 I didnБ─≥t find anything wrong in subcategories.tpl, could anyone fix this on 4.1.0

It looks nice when I comment out this image icon line in subcategories.tpl
{*if $tmp} [img]{if $current_category.icon_url}{$current_category.icon _url}{else}{$xcart_web_dir}/image.php?id={$cat}&type=C{/if}[/img] {/if*}
but how do I make it looks neat with this included?

I noticed the following enhancement listed:

advanced membership system: ability to assign one or more memberships to each of the products, categories, payment methods, tax rates and discounts;

Does this mean that shipping methods can/will be defined by membership levels in the new release?

I know this was a common question and request in the past. Retail members would have one shipping method available, and wholesale customers would have another. Retail customers would not have the wholesale shipping option available, and vice versa. This would make life so much easier - if I am interpreting this enhancement correctly.

Also, forgive me if this question was asked and answered already, I didn't see it in the previous posts: What's the anticipated ETA for the production release?

Thanks to all.

I don't know if this has been requested or not, but at least basic support for users with disabilities would be good to have default in the 4.1 templates.

At least basic Priority 1 Conformance Level A would be great.
http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/#priorities

We have tried our best to meet these basics but there are so many templates that need to be changed from their default that performing later upgrades with the Xcart upgrade tool becomes a nightmare of tedium.

It would also be great to see tab indentation for code blocks become standard. This generally makes reading over the code structure of the templates far easier.

Yes, both of these would be great! :D

NNNNNNnnnooooooooo..........

I hate that! :evil:

Why so? :?

Besides, if you don't like it is far easier to just select everything and hit "shift + tab" until it all squishes over the left-hand side of the screen. It is a LOT more tedious to have to properly indent each line of code.

I work on code 14-18 hours a day and it is a ton easier to pick out any given portion of the code that I need to work with if it has a visible structure rather than just a mess of tags all lumped together.

Amen to that!

Taking the choke out of the "choke points" (especially checkout) makes shoppers much happier, reduces abandoned carts, and makes them spend more and revisit more often.

I like how you simplified some things on your client's sites. Your checkout sequence still seems kinda long, though.

I wish there was an option for a one or two page checkout. Even one page tests better in most A/B split tests, as it seems most of today's customer now prefer tabbing/scrolling (which is instant) over clicking (which incurs a delay).

People don't like delays, and they certainly hate MULTIPLE PAGES of paperwork. A single page has the illusion of being just that... one page. That's my guess as to why it wins.

I work on code for hours a day too and I used to like code that was separated.

Now I like all my code on the left.
I am able to work much faster because all opening tags are in the same place on the page so I can quickly scroll and keep my eye in the same spot and know where I am in the code. Any indentation is a mess.

My preference is indenting nested tags, like:
I also think it adheres to xhtml standards.

And I like it like this:

or this

Shipping
 

I think it's pretty obvious that a lot of people aren't happy with the current "Real Time Shipping" situation in X-Cart and I was wondering if an attempt was going to be made to improve it in the next release? I saw nothing about it in "SHIPPING MANAGEMENT" section of the change doc. Anybody have any info? To be specific, I'm talking about the improvements that CenturyPerf suggested in a previous post:

"1) The X-Cart coding within the UPS, FEDEX, USPS modules needs some minor enhancements to validate dimensions and weights correctly and also a limit needs to be set (max weight and dimensions *Per Box*) on a per shipper basis. See below

2) The database and cart coding in the product section needs to be able to tell UPS (and other shipping agencies) the correct values for each item as listed below:

- 2a) Add (3) data entry boxes for EACH product for "length", "height", and "width" (in inches or centimeters .. "selectable"). (If there is No data entry, dimensions are ignored, otherwise the calculated dimensions are transmitted for real time rates). This would be three new columns in the products table of the database.

- 2b) Add a radio button (or other selection) for EACH product that when active (checked) it tells UPS that this item can only be shipped as a SINGLE box. This would be one new column in the products table of the database.

- 2c) Set a max weight - max dimension rollover point selectable by the admin of the site. This must be set so that if either weight or dimension is exceeded on the ordered items it rolls over and adds another box. I would prefer this to be an editable area with the X-Cart admin area. NOTE: This would be a GLOBAL selection within the "shipping options" section of X-Cart.

- 2d) Upon checkout using "real time" rates X-Cart tells the selected shipping agencies the compiled number of boxes and dimesions/weights of each box to be shipped. This data is then processed and returns the shipping calculation results (for each activated shipping method) to the checkout page.

3) The above items will need to correspond with matching columns in the product table of the database so as to store this data for each product. (length, height, width, single box, in the "xcart_products" table. Plus the added data for rollover dimensions, max weight per carrier, max dimensions "length, height, and width" per carrier possibly in the "xcart_shipping_options" table).

4) When real time rates are selected for your store the cart will now communicate a fairly correct amount of "boxes", "dimensions", and "weights" of each box being shipped as part of the customer's order.

5) We DO NOT need to list the amount of boxes or weights on customer invoice or order information. Our shipping departments' should have the ability to use common sense knows how to ship orders efficiently. This procedure needs only to be transparent to both the customers and vendor.

EXAMPLE:

One item the customer orders is a very large item that must be shipped as an individual item (Box #1). The customer orders other items that will now compile by weight "and" dimension as additional boxes as part of this shipment. This will work very well on wholesale stores that sell in case quantity. You could set a separate "case" part number for particular items if you wish. Once the weight or dimension "max" value is exceeded the cart tells UPS that there is more box(es) as part of the order (Box #2, #3, etc).

Now, with the max dimensions and values (rollover values) are left up to each vendor, you could effectively use this feature to not only be more accurate with your shipping calculations charged to the customer, but you could also come pretty close in matching the sizes to what shipping boxes each company uses. Say that you ship average sized items and your MAX box size is 24" x 16" x 12". You could set that as your max compiled "dimension" size and use default weight values from the shipping carriers as a secondary rollover point. It should be well posted/documented what the max dimensions/weights are for each shipping carrier.

The coding for this is already part of the UPS, USPS, and FEDEX available XML scripts.

For examples see what the above shipping agencies use on their own websites: (http://wwwapps.ups.com/calTimeCost?loc=en_US, http://postcalc.usps.gov/, http://www.fedex.com/ratefinder/home?cc=US&language=en)

The above modification is nothing more than what the above shipping agencies already ask for, either using their online services or offline software. With the size and weight varieties of the products we sell, we MUST have accurate shipping calculations."

Anybody have any ideas or info?

For me, this makes coding error prone because similar tags (such as <td> and <tr> for instance) can look the same when quickly scrolling through 100's of lines. It also causes problems when trying to determine if some block of code has been properly closed.

In any event, it is like I said before. If you don't like structured code it is easy enough to remove indentation with a few key strokes, but very tedious to add the indentation for pre-existing code. :P

More people need to complain about this. X-Cart devs quoted me over $2000.00 to do this. Those of us that are not selling just books, t-shirts, or gift baskets need to voice their needs.

I don't use tables for layout. I use css.

I use a text editor that highlights non closed tags.

For tabular data, using tables is probably the easiest and most browser cross-compatible way to go. After we got ahold of the Xcart code we rewrote a fair portion of the customer front-end using CSS because of its compactness. However, due to the fact that Internet Explorer doesn't properly render a lot of very handy CSS features we have had to avoid extensive use to maintain easy cross-browser compatibility.

As for code highlighting, we use Macromedia Dreamweaver which helps with that. One primary problem though is that the templates used with Xcart are segmented so that a parent element may run across several files before finally closing. This makes Dreamweaver's code checking cabilities null and void in those instances, which sadly, are many.

What coding application do you currently use for your code highlighting? I am always looking to try something new. Currently working with Zend Studio, Dreamweaver, and Notepad++.

vim

TextMate
or
SubEthaEdit

TextPad (windows) which has PHP, XHTML, and CSS templates for highlighting keywords.

This is off topic, but following your tangent....
a friend of mine loves to compact all of his code (xhtml and css) to single lines(css) and to the left (xhtml), which is really difficult tto sort through for those of us that are not used to his code style. I hired him for a few projects, but I ended up editing indents back into all of his code.

With indent formatting, you can very quickly and easily tell which tags are within which tags. Without indent formatting, it is more difficult to do that.

Back on topic...shipping.

Last I checked, the Fedex module did not have an option to ask the customer whether their address was a business or resident address. If you tell Fedex that it is a business address and it is really a residence, then Fedex will fine you. Am I the only person that has brought this up to the X-Cart guys before? Everytime I've made a suggestion to these guys, they always want me to quote me a price for custom programming. I'm trying to help improve their software by giving them feedback.

The shipping, particularly the FedEx module, needs extensive work. Most carts including some well known open source/free ones have X-cart very well beat in this area. For as good as x-cart is in much of it's functionality the rudimentary shipping options are suprisingly lacking given that it is such an important aspect of 95+% of online merchants. Perhaps because the developers themselves deal with a business that sells electronically delivered products they don't quite realize how superior other carts are to them in physical shipping?..dunno.

It would really be something if the API of the major shipping carriers such as

fedex, ups , usps could be integrated directly into the back end of x-cart.

Meaning right from admin panel, if say i have usps account, i can view an order print its postage and label( charging my account i have with the shipping carrier) and it would automatically put the tracking info into the order details.

All with the convenience of not leaving the admin.

It is possible as some people here on the forum have hacked this in for customers.

Ahh yes, one other feature that would be greatly appreciated is to ensure that Xcart is compatible with MySQL 5.0.

Yes!!!

Since MySQL 5 was officially released last week it is time.

My host has been running a test server with 5 installed and is only waiting for cpanel to be compliant. When it is all servers will be upgraded to MySQL 5 like it or not.

5 has been available for developers to test for a long time now and it offers many things that many people want so I think that hosts will make the move sooner rather than later.

# Stored Procedures
# Triggers
# Views

Xcart should have all many of its sql functions rewritten to take advantage of stored procedures!

Xcart should develop views for reporting which link together tables, like product, product_categories, categories....into a easy to read report.

opens up a whole new world from a DB standpoint.

Same as X-Cart devs :).

Ditto

Really wishing I had a Mac. Vim and SubEthaEdit look very handy. :cry:

Though I can't really beat the PHP code checking abilities of Zend Studio with anything else yet.

I would just be happy if they would stop using seperate "SELECT COUNT(*)" queries to calculate the total navigation pages and instead just use "SELECT FOUND_ROWS()" which is far faster and far less resource intensive.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/information-functions.html#id3078928

Not everyone runs 4.0-5.0 of MySQL. There are better ways to approach this, one query, and count the keys in the array holding the results with PHP instead of two queries with gobs of useless conditions that just slows down the server even more.

I've been upgrading a 3.5.x site to 4.0.x and it has over 6k products, and I can't even get past the home page without killing the big sql select lines in include/search.php.

Tried this, actually. Keeping it in the DB using limits is over twice as fast. On our site it brought the average execution of func_search_products down from 4.5 seconds to 2.1 seconds.

I am a little confused about the necessity of keeping support for pre MySQL 4.0 in the latest Xcart releases. I can't even find a location to download version 3.x anymore.

Hosting companies may still be installing MySQL 3. Just a year ago I know some were, so those customers would still need the support.

Then perform conditional queries dependant upon the MySQL version. If you are concerned that a version of MySQL may not support the FOUND_ROWS() information function do something similar to the following example:
The above would provide a speed boost to those that can support the query syntax and would still retain backwards compatibility for older clients without significantly complicating the code.

Well, Vim is ported on virtually all platforms. Would not use it on platforms other than UNIX though. And IDEs like Zend Studio is definitely better for Windows.

Oops, going a little bit off-topic here :oops:

Just to clarify, Linux and Mac OS X are UNIX derivatives, vim ships with Linux and Mac OS X, and Zend Studio is available for Linux and Mac OS X. :D

I also agree that shipping could use some more attention in this next version of X-Cart (keeping this post on topic :wink:).

Wise man said it best, opionions are like butts, everyone has one and they all stink. :lol:

I use UltraEdit and SmartFTP for coding.
Photoshop CS for image editing.

To sum the topic back up, X-Cart defiantly needs improvement on these areas:
- Shipping API's directly integrated
- Search optimizations (rewrite of include/search.php perhaps?) to handle large product/category databases. Along with offering a more relevant internal search to customers. More Details: :arrow: http://cart-lab.blogspot.com/2005/10/improving-x-carts-search.html
- Improved Usuability (the new speed lane checkout is defiantly a good step towards this)

two cents deposited. :wink:

yeh just to bring this thread back on topic now is the time for everyone to dive in and take a look at 4.1 beta.

if you dont have your say now you can hold your breath for another year

what we should be looking at is bug reports / comments on usability etc

if there is something that has bugged you using x4.0 and before nows the time to have your say..............

Managing Options
 

How about managing options for multiple products? I just tried adding an option for more than one product. It had six products in my list of products I am modifying at once and the new option only added to the first two. I've always had problems duplicating options (modifiers or variants) among multiple products. It would be so nice to be able to setup an option for one product then duplicate it among 100 other similar products.

Re: Managing Options
 

what happens if you list all the products you want to change in admin...

- choose modify selected
- choose options etc

does this apply the options to them all ?

Another nicety would be if stored and encrypted credit card information was accessible by the customer at checkout instead of having to re-enter the information again each visit. This would further streamline the checkout process for everybody's favorite type of customer...the one that comes back for more. :)