[xplorer]

Originally Posted by roband

Any chance of posting the NEW-4.2.0-file here please?

Regards, Robert.

X-CART 4.2 NEW FEATURES
========================

DESIGN AND APPEARANCE
----------------------

* CSS based layout
The pages of X-Cart's Customer area now use a DIV-based, tableless layout. The <table> tag is no longer used for layout purposes; tables are used only to display tabular data. The appearance of the Customer area is now fully controlled by CSS.

The advantages brought about by using CSS instead of tables include the following:

- The structural organization of X-Cart's pages has been improved. This is good for SEO, because web crawlers now find relevant content in the source code of X-Cart's pages more easily.

- With the presentational items placed separately in CSS files, X-Cart's pages have become smaller. This means that your server experiences less load, the page content is downloaded faster and uses less bandwidth.

- The main content of pages is now placed at the top of the source code. This causes the information to display first, leaving the presentational elements to load at the end. This way the main content of the page is immediately visible to the user; the user does not have to wait for an entire table with content and graphics to load as it happened with table based layout.

- The appearance of the storefront can now be changed significantly by editing the styles in CSS files (skin1/main*.css).

At present, X-Cart's layout is based on the 'Light & Lucid' visual scheme. The rest of X-Cart's traditional layouts (3-columns, 2-columns, small shop), color schemes and dingbat sets have been removed.


* Separate template sets for the store's Customer area and back end.
The templates of X-Cart's back end have been completely separated from the templates of X-Cart's Customer area. Now you can customize the look and feel of the Customer area without fearing that you might ruin the design of the back end.


* CSS/DIV-based popup windows
X-Cart's Customer area now uses CSS/DIV-based popup windows instead of the standard popup windows used in the previous X-Cart versions. The new popup windows can be moved and resized.


* No splash page
X-Cart's splash page index.html has been removed. Now visitors of the store's Customer area get directly onto the Home page.


* New method of displaying detailed product images
It has become possible to enable such a mode of display of detailed product images where all the detailed images of a product will be displayed in the Customer area on the Product details page of the respective product as thumbnails below the main product image. When the mouse hovers over one of the detailed product image thumbnails, the respective detailed product image will be displayed in the place of the product's main product image; the size of the detailed product image in this case will be reduced to the size of the main product image. When a mouse click occurs on a detailed product image thumbnail, the respective detailed product image will be displayed at full size in a modal window. The modal window used to display detailed product images provides simple navigation controls allowing the user to view the next/previous detailed image of the product or select a specific detailed image of the product from the set.

SEO IMPROVEMENTS
----------------

* "Clean" URLs support
Now it is possible to define user and search engine friendly URLs for the pages of products, categories, manufacturers and embedded static pages - "clean" URLs; for example, http://www.example.com/xcart/Javascript_definitive_guide.html instead of http://www.example.com/xcart/product.php?productid=XXX. Clean URLs can be defined on the Details pages of the respective objects (products, categories, manufacturers and static pages).
X-Cart allows you to keep a history of clean URL changes for each page so users can find the pages they have bookmarked even after the clean URLs of these pages change.


* Changes in the way meta tags are defined and used
It has become possible to define description and keywords meta tags for the product pages of your store. In previous versions of X-Cart, these meta tags were generated for product pages automatically based on the contents of the 'Product name' and 'Short description' fields. Now you have full control over the meta description and keywords of your product pages and can adjust these tags separately.
It has also become possible to define description and keywords meta tags for the manufacturer and embedded static pages of your store.
We also added an option allowing the description and keywords meta tags defined for a category to be used for the subcategories and products contained in that category.
As before, the 'General settings/SEO options' section of the Admin area allows you to provide description and keywords meta tags for your store site in general; however, these meta tags are now used differently: they are now applied only to those pages that do not have any meta description and keywords tags of their own and are not using any other meta description and keywords.


IMAGES
------

* Automatic generation of product image thumbnails (GDLib 2.0 or better is required)
When creating or editing a product, it is now possible to automatically generate a product thumbnail from a previously uploaded product image. The resulting product thumbnail will be a reduced-size version of the product image from which it is generated. The size of automatically generated product thumbnails can be set by the store administrator.

SHIPPING
--------

* Dimensional shipping

It has become possible to specify dimensions for each of the products in the store (See the Product details page) and to use these dimensions for shipping rates calculation by such online real-time shipping rate calculation services as UPS, USPS, FedEx, etc.
X-Cart now provides a packaging algorithm that allows it to split a single shipment into multiple packages in accordance with the limitations (maximum package weight and dimensions) imposed by the selected online real-time shipping rate calculation service. With this algorithm, it has become possible to receive real-time shipping rates for a shopping cart even if this cart contains a large quantity of products whose total weight and volume make sending these products in a single package impossible due to the limitations of the selected online real-time shipping rate calculation service.

* Shipping from providers and per-provider shipping cost (X-Cart PRO)
It has become possible to specify an individual seller address for each provider and to use this seller address for shipping rates calculation by online real-time shipping rate calculation services. This improvement makes it possible to use X-Cart PRO for warehouse stores in which a common storefront is used to showcase the products of several different stores that ship products from different locations. A provider's seller address can be specified in the provider's user profile.

TO BE CONTINUED...