X-Cart forums

[xcel]

Originally Posted by ADDISON

I really like Qualiteam's approach to join this beta testing. Just got a newsletter informing me about a $15k USD prize for the most active tester. Good job guys, but you should pay in cash

Pretty sure you misread that, or perhaps you were being funny.

XC5 License = $500
30 Testers x $500 = $15,000

[xplorer]

Thank you for the words! We're glad to hear that we are going in the right direction.

Originally Posted by ADDISON

If I swap Apache for ngix + APC (php) + Varnish(http), can I speed it up more than it is now? Did you test some server configurations for providing a point of view about the best speed we can achieve?

We haven't tested XC5 on this configuration, however using APC or Memcached should make XC5 work faster. Switching to SSD from HDD should help as well. If you get a chance to try XC5 on nginx+varnish, please let us know the results. Thanks!

Originally Posted by RichieRich

One thing I noticed was there was not a currency change option. It seems you can change the language to native french, but then still display dollars? This would be a welcome improvement.

Dragging a product with variants to cart doesnt seem logical without forcing the customer to choose a variant.

Also, in the Upcoming products items, there appears to be a little confusion but likely a simple fix where you are showing in the same page:
In stock (1000 items available)
Coming soon (expected on Sep 4, 2013)

Thanks!

1. The currency change option is in our wish list, however I'm not sure how soon we can start working on it.

2. To stimulate sales XC5 shows the lowest price a product can be purchased for at the very moment. That's why products with variants will always appear in lists with the price of the cheapest in-stock variant. After dragging a product to cart the price should not change from the one you saw in the list. So, in case of a product with variants the cheapest in-stock variant will go into the cart. Does this sound more logical now?

3. Aha! Bug. We will fix it.

Originally Posted by ADDISON

Anyway all depends how long will take this beta testing, I hope enough to solve as much issues as we find. Not like in 4.5, one week for testing.

I agree, one week for testing is not enough. I think we will stick to something like 3-4 weeks.

Originally Posted by kustomrides

What is the difference between the basic and advanced packages, besides price? I read that the advanced package includes coupons and discounts. Also, XC Gold upgrades to 5.x for $300 ... I assume the advanced package. What's the upgrade to the basic package?

In a few words, the basic package will be enough to start selling online, but marketing/promotion tools (like Product filter, Instant search, Product comparison, Coupons, Discounts, etc) will go into the advanced package only.

We will prepare a detailed comparison table with information on upgrades to the basic package closer to the release date.

The beta version includes all modules, so you can find more bugs and glitches and get awarded with the free XC5 license (the advanced one)

Originally Posted by alinush

I was happy to install a copy of the newly announced version. First thing I noticed after performing a fresh install, was that in Store Setup > Cart and Checkout there seems to be a language var missing ?

This seems to be a bug as this section should look like this:



Is it a "clean" XC5 installation? Or have you done something before this weird field appeared?

Originally Posted by ADDISON

If you have Attributes and Groups of Attributes like in Magento more will join this new version. I just tested both Magentos, 1.8 alpha and 2.0 and I am not satisfied. But their attributes are very powerful: to use in comparison, sort by, layering navigation, product page.

Yes, attributes that you specify for products are used in:
- specs tab on the product page
- options
- comparison
- layered navigation (filters)
- variants

Originally Posted by ADDISON

In Feature Comparison please do not compare apples with smartphones. Just take the features from XC4 Feature Comparison. I provided you in ideas.x-cart.com a few addition to improve it to our days.

Will check your suggestions. Thanks!

Originally Posted by mcinque

One of the most important thing is language files.

Starting from the very first versions of X-Cart we have spent many time editing and translating properly every single line of the language file.

Every X-Cart language pack that I've seen need to be fixed a lot to improve his quality, so if we must redo all the language editing work from the beginning, well... this will be very frustrating.

Yes, this is important. Unfortunately, XC5 has a different set of "language variables", so language files created for XC4 won't work there.

Would you like to participate in creating the Italian translation module for X-Cart 5?

[cherie]

Yes, this is important. Unfortunately, XC5 has a different set of "language variables", so language files created for XC4 won't work there.

A lot of the data structure will most likely be very different so this should just be one more dataset that gets converted. It's important.

[mcinque]

Originally Posted by xplorer

Would you like to participate in creating the Italian translation module for X-Cart 5?

Sounds interesting. Can you contact me in private msg?

[ADDISON]

Mate, why did you deflate the balloon? Now when you opened the box, more people will say no more $15k? Ok, I will not join the testing idea. I really appreciate if the whole community will get into testing this milestone in X-Cart life.

Anyway, one license is mine

Originally Posted by xcel

Pretty sure you misread that, or perhaps you were being funny.

XC5 License = $500
30 Testers x $500 = $15,000

[ADDISON]

@explorer: Magento is known for eating resources and I can confirm that. Lot resources. Two years ago I spent time with different server configuration. I remember ngix + APC/Memcache2 + varnish was a great combination. From 1.40 sec I could decrease to 0.26 sec. Then caching pages I could achieve 0.20 sec. in a store with 1500 products. Speed is not for Google is for visitors. I am using Page Load extension in Chrome and I can say lots of websites are not optimized for speed. Too many. Server configuration is very important.

X-Cart 4.6 was announced as a step forward in speed. We should do our best to have a much better X-Cart 5.0 in speed. I am interested seeing a comparison between 4.6.1 and 5.0.0 too.

Once I will make some tests I will provide figures.

[sinobest]

hope v5 errorless and runs fastest.

[totaltec]

Originally Posted by exitfairway

What ever happened to free future updates to shopping cart software?

X-cart 5 is a completely new codebase, not merely another update. X-cart 4 is a separate platform, and will continue to be updated.

XC5 is a giant leap into the future, not an update. Absolutely everything has been coded from scratch. This is a terrific move for Qualiteam, they have needed an income stream from updating the software for a long time. With this business model, we can rest easy that Qualiteam will be putting their very best work into improving the platform, and that they will be compensated for same.

I applaud this decision. I think the majority of successful merchants can agree that they would be willing to pay for updates. It only makes sense. After all, you only need to upgrade if you want the new modules/functions that have been added since the last release. I'm sure security patches will be a separate matter.

[totaltec]

Originally Posted by sinobest

hope v5 errorless and runs fastest.

So far in my tests it runs a little slower on the same equipment as X-cart 4. We'll see how this improves with the right server tweaks.

[moomal]

I spent most of yesterday going through XC5, trying to accomplish the same tasks that I currently do on XC4 (adding and modifying products, importing/exporting data, updating inventory, etc). Here are my thoughts so far:

- Product search (admin) no longer contains certain search options that I used on XC4, for example product ID, availability, and price.

- On the Catalog/Products page, there are check boxes next to each item, but no checkbox at the top to check/uncheck all.

- The only option available from the checkboxes on the Catalog/Products page is to "Clone Selected". You cannot export selected products nor bulk modify them - both functions I use regularly.

- I find "Market Price" a confusing name for the list price - I've never heard anyone call it that before. Either go back to calling it "List Price" or change it to "MSRP".

- All our URLs currently end in "/", but it looks like the only extension available for clean URLs is ".html". This means that a transition to XC5 would change all our URLs, leading to potentially devastating SEO consequences. Yes, I know you can set up redirects, but it's not a perfect solution. Instead, you should allow people to choose, in the settings, which extension (/,.html,.htm,.php, or something else) they would like to use.

- I like that inventory tracking can be disabled on a product-by-product basis, but it should still be possible to mark items in and out of stock when inventory is disabled. We have many products that are drop-shipped and we do not need the inventory tracked, but we do still need to put them in and out of stock. This is not the same as marking the product available for sale, because that actually removes it from the front end.

- In the shipping rates section, the dollar values are followed by 4 trailing zeros (after the decimal point), but should only have two. The "Add markup" section doesn't have trailing zeros at all.

- Manufacturers no longer appear to exist.

- It would be useful if you could turn categories on and off like products, so that the pages are still there, but not listed on the front end.

- On the Modules Marketplace, I don't understand what the message "The module is available for older core versions only" means. You should probably change it to something that is clearer.

- I can't find any way to assign related product relationships between products, like you could with XC4 product links. In fact, I can't find any sign of any upselling/cross-selling functionality.

- It is only possible to export products, not categories. I assume that this means it is also only possible to import products. We use the import/export function for categories frequently.

- If I upload a large product image to the "Product images" tab of the product page (back end), then it displays in its original size in the image listings. It's very difficult to manage images when you have 10 1500x1500 images uploaded for a product.

- There is no image zoom whatsoever. This is a very important feature in our market as the buying decision is almost completely visual.

- There is no wish list.

- I would recommend changing "Color Schemes" (under Look & Feel settings) to "Themes" (because people will want to change the layout of their stores, not just the colors) and allow us to upload/install new themes in a similar fashion to Modules, and probably also introduce a Theme Marketplace as well, instead of the current system of installing new themes as modules.

- The directory structure for themes seems inconsistent. For example, the "mobile" folder (if you install the Mobile module) contains the folders "admin" and "customer", each of which has an "en" folder inside it, inside of which are the skin files. The "default" skin has an "en" folder inside it, but no "customer" or "admin". Then there is an "admin" folder outside of the "default" folder, which has an "en" folder in it. Then there are the "common" and "mail" folders, which are separate from the rest. And the Color Schemes module adds three new themes that have their folders in the "modules" folder inside the "default" folder. I wanted to try and make a custom theme without touching the default theme, so I made another copy of the "default" folder inside the "skins" folder and renamed it "new", but it did not produce any new listing in the Look & Feel section. I hope I don't have to write a module to make a custom theme. A much more logical approach would be to give every theme its own top level folder. So "default", "mobile", "custom", etc (allowing people to create their own top level folders for their own themes, with whatever names they want). Then inside that put the "admin", "customer", "common", and "mail" folders. Then inside each of those (except maybe "common", which doesn't seem to need it), put the language folder (e.g. "en"). If someone does not put a custom version of a particular .tpl/.css/.js etc file into their custom theme, it will default back to that file's version in the "default" folder. As I mentioned earlier, you could let people install new themes in a similar way to modules, by allowing them to upload a zip file containing the theme, or add it from the (proposed) Theme Marketplace. A "clone theme" option would also be very useful, as it would allow people to change a theme without touching the original.

- I can't get clean URLs working. My categories and products have clean URLs defined and the .htaccess file provided with the installation package has been uploaded without any alterations, but they're just not working. I couldn't find anything in the settings that enables/disables clean URLs, so I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.

- There doesn't seem to be any way to bulk assign products to classes, expect through CSV import. A web-based interface to do this would be very useful.

- The CSV import does not allow you to assign values for the various attributes that a product has (for example, if a product has the attribute "color", you can't, through the CSV, say that the color of this product is green).

- The URLs for images in the CSV are crazy - I have no idea how I would import images correctly with such URLs. For example: /home/xxxxx/public_html/var/tmp/41a61b4ce1f5df2dd57bb5f6fe6de045/images/product/11/CT-LZ8S.jpeg. And why are images stored in a tmp folder anyway?