NEW: Localising a shop is an essential part of an internationalisation strategy. That’s why it’s important to think about the translation process well in advance. As from 11.09.2017 SmartStore is giving you the chance to use a new free service with any language for your SmartStore.NET shop (in the frontend or backend). The following link provides a good overview of the process http://translate.smartstore.com/. From the SmartStore.NET version 3.1 onwards, you can access this service via the backend and will be able to download and use any available language free of charge for your shop.
The roadmap to v3.1 (for the 1st quarter of 2018)
SmartStore.NET is continuing to grow and we'd like to keep you up to date so we can plan for the future together. This roadmap will show you what new features are available and what we’ve got planned next.
Cash rounding
Set your cash rounding rules for each currency and the payment methods to use. For example, you can specify that Swiss francs are rounded to 0.05 centimes (the denominator). You are free to set your own denominators and rules (threshold values for rounding up or down) and can also specify whether to round item amounts or only final amounts.
Optimised checkout
To make the checkout process more user-friendly, we’re going to fundamentally revise and simplify it.
Bootstrap 4 in the backend
As you know, from version 3.0 onwards, our new Frontend Theme Flex is based on Bootstrap 4. Due to time constraints, we left the backend theme for Bootstrap 2. When version 3.1 comes out, we’ll have migrated the backend to Bootstrap 4 and upgraded it.
Language packs & writing from right to left (RTL)
By the end of the first quarter of 2018, we plan to offer 13 language packs written by native translators. These will be free of charge. You can already use these from the Community Edition onwards. While we’re doing this, we’ll also make the frontend theme completely RTL-compatible (writing from the right to the left). The following language packs are already underway or ready (those in bold): German, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch/Belgian, Russian, Polish, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese.
Amazon Pay
With Amazon Pay, millions of customers in your online shop can pay using their Amazon account’s address and payment information. We've completely redesigned the plugin based on Amazon’s best practices and current requirements.
(Performance) faster image processing
From now on, thumbnails are deferred and generated asynchronously, which results in a significant increase in page delivery times and is also favoured by search engines. Therefore, from version 3.1 onwards, thumbnails not yet created will only be generated when requested by the browser.
Improved MegaMenu
Commercial plugin available exclusively from the "Professional Edition" onwards
Set the maximum number of menu items to display in the top level. All additional items will be summarised in a new, virtual dropdown list. This means there’s no need for annoying horizontal scrolling on desktop PCs when there are too many departments in the top hierarchy. You can also combine all or selected shop brands in a virtual dropdown list.
TinyImage
A commercial plugin available exclusively from "Premium Edition" onwards
A TinyImage ensures the highest compression rates for your uploaded images and thumbnails that are generated. It also offers WebP support with a potential saving of up to 80% on the original file size. Search engines will really like this, as will shop visitors on mobile devices. Experience shows us that media files take up by far the most disk space in a store. TinyImage will ensure you don’t exceed you hosting limits and may even save you money as there’s a lot less data to transfer.
UrlRewriter
A commercial plugin (Marketplace)
The UrlRewriter allows you to easily set the URL forwarding rules for your shop in the backend, according to mod_rewrite notation. This means you don’t have to painstakingly compile your rewrite rules in the web.config file. Installing program updates will be much easier in future. Also, you don’t need carry out a program restart if you edit the rule list.
