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Old 11-23-2015, 12:08 AM
 
xim xim is offline
 

X-Cart team
  
Join Date: Nov 2004
Posts: 677
 

Default X-Cart 5.3 roadmap

Hi xcarters,

I would like to share our plans regarding the 2016 roadmap. I will provide some details on the future of the X-Cart 5 platform today, and share the roadmap for v4 separately next week.

We believe that X-Cart 5 is the best platform to start a new business. Due to the flexible architecture, it allows you to keep up to date with the new releases and features. As a result this platform grows with your business.

There will be one more major update in the 5.2.x branch. Here is the roadmap: http://www.x-cart.com/roadmap.html. In addition, we are planning to close most of the existing bug reports in the bugtracker.

After that we are going to start working on the 5.3 version. Here are the key changes that we are planning to implement:

Integration with segment.com

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 in one click. 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.

A new vertical checkout template

The 5.3 version will have a new modern and simple template featuring the new vertical checkout.

It will be an HTML5 template based on Bootstrap, LESS and CSS3.

Drag-n-Drop design tool

In 5.3 we will implement a tool to drag and drop the blocks and sections around the website and manage the visibility of these blocks and sections in the customer storefront.

Better Template Structure

We want to make the customization process for template designers as simple as possible. Thus, we will re-design the template structure to make it more straightforward for the new developers. We will also implement the ability to create a new theme by adding a new folder in the “skins” directory.

After that you will just need to choose the new design in the admin area, copy the template files you require from the original folder to the new one and customize the templates as you want.

So, it should be as simple as in XC4, but with better upgradability.

We also remember about our 3d party developers. We will provide them with the guidelines for the major changes in the template structure to adapt the existing functionality to the new version.

Replace Flexy with Twig

Flexy is a very clear and simple template framework, but it hasn’t been improved for several years. We need to move forward. We did some thorough investigation as to what we should choose - Twig or Smarty - and selected the first one. Twig is very similar to Smarty by way of syntax (hey, v4 platformers), but much more powerful and popular. At the same time, our development team has managed to tweak some Twig classes to make it work much faster.

We created an automatic converter to re-code over 2000 template files that we have now, and we will surely share this converter with the community to adapt the existing functionality for the new version.

So, more documentation, more examples, more functions, more flexibility for customization - http://twig.sensiolabs.org/

Editing of product groups and other UI/UX back end improvements

We collected a lot of requests to implement the product group modifying mode. This is a very powerful feature, but we want to give our merchants the best experience, so we cannot just copy the UI/UX from v4 to v5. Now we have a concept of how to make it easy and clear.

At the same time we will re-work some input fields and widgets in the admin area for better usability for merchants.

Also we want to implement an easy way to customize email notifications.

Code base improvements

We are going to increase the minimum required php version to 5.4. We would prefer to make it 5.5, 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 allow us to update the Doctrine to the latest version which will make X-Cart faster.

There will also be some other improvements:
  • The template executive functions will use absolute template paths instead of the “magic” logic when the system detects the “admin” and “customer” folders automatically. At the same time we will re-work the compiling process to reduce the number of created objects. This is a huge task that will affect most of the classes, but it will make X-Cart much faster.
  • At the moment we have separate template sets for the admin and customer areas. Even if some files look the same and do the same thing, they still have to be separate files for each of the areas. We will add the ability to have common templates and widgets that can be used in both the areas, admin and customer, without the need to duplicate the respective files. At the same time we will provide the ability to apply a common template to just one of the areas by extending it with a file for that specific area.
  • The structure of LC_Dependencies will be changed a little bit to improve the API for developers.
  • The engine for the inclusion of static assets will be improved to redefine CSS classes more easily.
  • The profiler will be improved to make it better suited for X-Cart classes. At the moment it shows generalized information. We want it to be more specific, which will be of value to developers as a tool for finding the store’s performance bottleneck.
  • We will implement the Dependency Injection principle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_injection - to make the code more modular and mantainable by delegating object creation logic to the IoC container.

Surely, we will provide the community with the detailed explanation of what we have changed and the instructions they will need to follow to adapt their custom modifications and modules to the 5.3 version. For some changes (like flexy -> twig) we will provide an automatic script to convert the code.

These are our thoughts about the 5.3 version, and we want to discuss them with the community. Feel free to share your ideas and thoughts here.
__________________
Sincerely yours, Max Vydrin

Last edited by xim : 12-01-2015 at 06:00 AM.
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