We're proud to announce the availability of SmartStore.NET 2.1 Release Candidate.
Highlights
SmartStore.NET 2.1 is a developer-focused release with the main goal to drastically simplify plugin development, debugging & deployment,
thus being an important milestone for our upcoming Plugin Marketplace.
With SmartStore.NET 2.1, plugins finally are first-class citizens:
- Plugin assemblies can contain multiple providers now (e.g. shipping calculators, payment methods etc.)
- Views in plugin source folders can be edited during debug. The changes are reflected adhoc without the need for recompilation.
- No embedded views anymore. Views get copied to the deployment folder
- No cumbersome return View("Very.Long.View.Identifier") anymore, just regular MVC areas.
- Plugins can provide custom tabs more easily (now with on demand AJAX loading)
Other highlights are:
- New backend design and cleaner frontend theme
- More comfortable catalog management & product editing
- Increased performance, especially in the public frontend
- Lower memory consumption
- Better HTML editing with CKEditor (including media management & file upload)
- Simplified checkout process
- New Image Gallery component in public product details page
- New payment plugins: AmazonPay & Accarda-Kar (PREMIUM only)
- Lots of other new features, improvements and a lot of bugfixes
Download
You can download SmartStore.NET 2.1 Release Candidate from our GitHub Repository. Click on the Source code button to download the full source code.
If you're interested in the compiled version only, click SmartStore.Web.2.1.0.rc.zip. Plugins which are not part of the core, can be obtained via
SmartStore.NET.AdditionalPlugins.2.1.0.rc.zip. Just copy the contents of this archive over to your main Plugins folder.
Upgrade from previous versions
The locations of many files has changed in this release, therefore we advise to (partially) delete the old app folder first rather than copying the new files over.
Folders you definitely should NOT delete are:
- App_Data
- Media
You should also delete the Themes folder, if you're sure that you didn't make any changes to the existing themes. Otherwise make a backup of your changes first, delete the Themes folder
and merge your changes back later. After you deployed the files, you can start the application in your browser. The database migration will be performed in the background automatically.
Please note that your own or any 3rd party plugin will not work anymore. Plugins other than those maintained by us have to be refactored first in order to be compatible
with SmartStore.NET 2.1.