michael_s's blog

With this latest release, osCmax has seen another 70+ improvements and fixes. The focus has been on clearing as many issues as possible while improving stability and usability. You will find that there are a lot if little improvements everywhere - things just work a little bit better, smoother, and look a bit more polished.

http://www.oscmax.com/project/osCMax

Here are a few highlights of what has been done between beta 2 and this release:

• Fallback HTML template updated to current feature set, now a viable replacement for fallback. If you want to use the new html tag template system, it is now fully implemented.
• Large scale language/translation work. Default language packs are now file-complete and fully functional. (Translations are being finished)
• Added many new user-friendly error messages both to admin and catalog
• Added a configuration checking screen to the admin to inform the administrator of any problems with the shop installation
• Fixed Paypal and shipping amount issue where charges were randomly lost due to customer action
• Updated USPS shipping module to match new USPS API
• Resolved issue with cart totals/quantity discounts not displaying properly
• Fixed articles reviews editing and tweaked articles features
• Search result quantity now can be set differently for catalog and admin
• Fixed page module controller activation action
• Ajax country/state selector fixed on all customer pages
• Full UTF-8 Character set support

I am extremely happy with the performance of the initial beta, and I am looking forward to sharing beta 2 with you. The response from the osCmax community has been overwhelming and I want to personally thank all the community members that took the time to test the initial beta. 

Beta 1 of osCmax v2.5 was officially released Monday. This is a pre-release for testing, and while it is quite stable, it is not recommended production use just yet. After a few weeks of beta testing, if all goes well, v2.5 stable will be generally released for production. For those following development, you will notice that the version number has changed a bit from what we had been using. Due to the large amounts of changes to the code, we wanted to reflect that more accurately with our version number designation, thus the jump to v2.5.

We encourage everyone to download the new version for testing, as it is a major change in osCmax and you will want to get familiar with all the new features and changes.

Customer Comments - Fully redesigned and allows admins to make comments on customer orders. The comments are displayed on the orders page as well as the customers page for easy tracking.

Must Accept Terms - This forces a customer to accept your store's terms and conditions and will not allow checkout unless they do. This is optional of course, with an easy switch to turn on or off.

In the upcoming osCmax v2.1 release, new product pricing features have been added to allow for quantity price breaks. These price breaks can be set per product and per customer group allowing you to specify different price breaks for each and every item in your inventory. Additionally, you can specify different price breaks for different customer groups, such as retail, wholesale, etc...

This is the third article in this week's series, covering the new features in the yet to be released osCmax v2.1. There has been a strong effort to update the base features of osCmax to include important usability improvements for customers, while allowing store operators to have full control over which of these elements they want to implement.

Continuing my focus on main page improvements, we have added another module : The jQuery slide show module. This module allows you to add images and text to the slide show and have them appear on the main page, linked to whatever you want, products, categories, articles, external sites, whatever you choose. Configuration options are extensive and include changing the display dimensions, transitions, transition speed, slide intervals, and many more.

This week I am highlighting new features in the upcoming release of osCmax v2.1 and today I am detailing the new Featured Categories and Featured Product Sets. A little history is in order here. For a long time, the main page of osCmax was fairly static and did not easily allow a shop owner to feature products of their choice. There was a new products module and a specials module, but each has its obvious limitations. One of the most common support requests we received was how to accomplish featuring specific products or categories on the main page. There was no easy answer, until now.