Smartstore 4.0.0 is available

Highlights

• (NEW) Media Manager: Powerful and lightning-fast explorer/manager for media files (commercial plugin exclusively bundled with Pro Edition)
• (NEW) Rule Builder: Powerful rule system for visual business rule creation
  • Dozens of predefined rules out-of-the-box
  • Supports logical operators (AND/OR) and unlimited grouping/nesting
  • Cart rules: can be applied to discounts, shipping and payment methods
  • Customer rules: used to auto-assign customers to customer groups for 1-to-1 content targeting
  • Product rules: used to auto-assign products to categories based on filter definitions (e.g. price, brand, color, stock etc.)
• (NEW) New permission (ACL) system: Granular tree-based permission management based on customer groups. Supports inheritance to allow or deny entire permission ranges
• (NEW) Personalized product recommendations: Replaces homepage products dynamically with personalized product recommendations based on customer interests. (commercial plugin)
• (NEW) Geo Blocker: Restricts shop access based on visitor country or IP address ranges (commercial plugin)
• (NEW) Dashboard with charts: New dashboard widgets display key data like orders, customers, bestsellers etc. in nice graphical charts.

Breaking changes

• (Dev) Install\UninstallPermissions has been removed from IPermissionService. No longer needs to be called by plugins. Permissions are now automatically installed\uninstalled.
• (Dev) IDiscountRequirementRule and IShippingMethodFilter has been removed. Discounts and shipping methods can now be filtered by rule sets.
• (Dev) Customer navigation property CustomerRoles has been replaced by CustomerRoleMappings, a new entity for role mappings.
• The search index must be rebuilt due to various enhancements.
• (Dev) The wrong name of API endpoint LocalizedPropertys has been corrected and renamed to LocalizedProperties.

New Features

• Granular permissions: All permissions of a customer directly visible on the customer edit page.
• DEV: Added Visual Studio extension to create Smartstore Plugins
• GDPR conform Cookie Consent Manager
• SEO: XML Sitemap now includes blog, news and forum
• SEO: do 301 redirect to URL without trailing slash
• SVG support for image uploads.
• Schedule tasks: new property "Priority" runs tasks with higher priority first when multiple tasks are pending.
• Added XML Sitemap settings to backend UI.
•  Add published property to ProductTag entity.
•  Apply percentage discounts also on tier prices.
•  Implement ACL and multistore capability on menu item level.
•  Menu Builder items: implement support for icon (brand) color.
• Show bundle item images in order details like in shopping cart details.
• MegaSearch:
  • Added more text analysis options (e.g. Lucene.Net classic analyzer).
  • Added tool to display internal information about a search, such as Lucene.Net terms.
  •  Find the grouped product when searching for the SKU, GTIN, MPN of a non individually visible, associated product.
  •  Find product when searching for GTIN or MPN of an attribute combination.
  • Perf. Added option to ignore attribute filtering property on product level.
• Web-API:
  •  Added a parameter to start an import after uploading import files.
  •  Added endpoints for ProductPictures, ProductCategories and ProductManufacturers to allow updating DisplayOrder.
  •  Added endpoints for NewsLetterSubscription.
•  Direct links to variations on a product.
•  Add ability to hide products from catalog, but not search.
• Implement hidden boolean setting that controls which catalog search engine implementation should be used in backend.
• Enable images and color values for search filters to be stored for specification attribute options.
• Add field for manufacturer bottom description like for categories.
• Add new field for product condition.
• ACL support for manufacturers.
• Add new field for tracking URL to shipment entity to better track shipments.
• (Page Builder) Added a Page Builder block to display blog posts.

Improvements

• Make MeasureDimension and MeasureWeight localizable.
• Show an example currency value for custom formatting value changes.
• Card desk instead of a grid for customer addresses on customer edit page.
• Display "price from" in product lists if any attribute combination price exists.
• Reworked blog & news section.
• Activated ReCaptcha without keys can cause the merchant to lock himself out of the shop.
• Export: let a provider directly export to a file stream instead of a memory stream.
• Topic editor should display all menu item nodes that reference the current topic.
• UI: ACL, discount and store selection should be done via multiple select2.
• Updated UserAgent Parser.
• TinyImage: updated WebP detection patterns.
• PayPal PLUS:
  • Apply order of payment methods in backend to the list of third-party payment methods in checkout.
  • Send the billing address when redirecting to PayPal.
• Hide cart payment button for payment methods without match of applied rule sets.
• MegaSearch: Support exact value match for numeric range filters.
• Hide option prizes if "Call for price" is enabled.
• Debitoor: added an option to force a price type on invoices.
• BeezUp: export product costs.
• RTL: fixed alignment of product art badge.
• Sending of mails to customers uses generic message template now.
• UI: Added XmlSitemap settings to backend
• And many more other minor improvements

Bugfixes

• Export: Fixed KeyNotFoundException when batch size was 1.
• Fixed KeyNotFoundException when payment method friendly name ends with spaces.
• Cart: Fixed ShoppingCartSettings.ShowProductBundleImagesOnShoppingCart hides the bundle item name.
• MegaSearch:
  • Fixed the preset sorting order of products on a manufacturer page may be wrong depending on catalog settings.
  • Price facet filter bypasses Call for Pricing and shows the approximate price of a product.
  • The number of hits for product review facets was wrong in some cases.
  • Do not show facets for manufacturers or categories if they are limited to stores or subject to ACL.
  • Ghost facet filter groups will appear if a numeric value is assigned that matches to a different spec option.
• Page Builder:
  • Block with z-index < 0 can not be selected in story view - Block tools can reduce z-index below 0.
  • Manually editing/removing block cols/rows does not refresh grid state correctly.
  • Edit Mode rendering bug in Mac Safari
  • Added "Order" property to page Builder block to control rendering order of blocks in HTML output
• PayPal:
  • Fixed rare exception "Unsupported Media Type" (415) in PayPal PLUS.
  • Only process a partially refund IPN when the order refunded amount is zero. Otherwise the order refunded amount will be wrong.
• Customer import:
  • VatNumber and other fields were ignored.
  • Customer roles sometimes inserted several times.
  • Changed billing/shipping address was added instead of updating the existing one.
  • Region assigned to an address was not updated.
• Product tags:
  • Product tag count should filter also based on Visibility.
  • Product tag count sometimes not up-to-date due to missing cache clearance.
• Debitoor:
  • Avoid errors due to invalid quantity unit Id of 0.
  • rework quantity units.
  • Sometimes the SKU was missing on invoices.
• Multistore mapping was ignored for manufacturers in sitemap.
• Categories limited to stores were not displayed in tree view.
• Fixed InvalidOperationException in CreatePdfInvoiceAttachment when an order is placed by a guest.
• The ShowDescriptionInSubPages setting should also be applied to the bottom category description.
• Recaptcha: doesn't work for product reviews, blog and news comments if hidden captcha is activated.
• Customer FullName is not populated after registration.
• Web-API: fixed authentication error "Value cannot be null. Parameter name: name" when login type is email.
• Payone: fixed wrong hash value if redirecting option is activated.
• Azure: opening the configuration page resulted in an error.
• Shipping by weight: the surcharge hint was not displayed correctly.
• Off-canvas menu shows wrong product count for brand menu items.
• Images of newly added variants could be deleted automatically due to wrong image transient state.
• Menu display order is ignored for widget zone header_menu_special_after.
• RTL: Manage categories tree view.
• Biz-Importer: If the TaxRate table was missing, the assignment of the tax category to the product was not set.
• Import: adding URL records requires cache to be cleared.
• The order list summary do not respect all list filters and shows wrong aggregate values.
• Removing gift card issue.
• A delivery time cannot be deleted if it is assigned to a variant combination of a deleted product.
• BeezUp: fixes ArgumentNullException, parameter name "source".
• Avoid redirecting to the account activation page when trying to log in for the first time.
• The checkout button disappears when moving a product from the shopping cart to the wishlist.
• Menu builder: in case of system menus the template can changes accidentally when saving.
• Structured data: Replace length with depth property.
• 'View All' button from the offcanvas manufacturer menu causes 404 on mobile.
• Added missing sitemap task.
• ESD: browser freezes when editing file changelog
• And many more other minor fixes...