CF Shopkart 5.4 Will Be Out Soon!

I have been working the past few days on updating CF Shopkart to version 5.4. Besides fixing some bugs, this update is going to add in a few new features.

The biggest addition to this version is the new navigation menu system. Since the beginning of CF Shopkart all those years ago you have had to manually edit the navigation bar at the top of the site just below the header. Well, no more! By default, CFShopkart will continue to use the default navigation menu at the top. But in 5.4 you will be able to choose between a custom HTML menu, a basic HTML menu, a CF8 drop down menu, and a couple of different flash drop down menus. The menus will go 3 levels deep and they can be styled to match your site. You will be able to add page links, custom links, component links, and links to specific categories on the menu.

Another key new features is the ability to create multiple index files so that you can use different templates or layouts throughout your site. This new feature makes it so that you can tell the application to load a different index file for a specific page if you need to change the layout when a certain page is loaded.

Also included in this update is the long awaited ability to attach files to a product that a customer can download after they checkout. In previous versions of CF Shopkart I had the ability included to upload one file for a product. However, I had removed this feature when I released version 5 because I had started to rewrite it, but unfortunately lost the code I started working on when I had a hard drive fail. To make a long story short, I got busy with other things and eventually was able to begin programming the feature back into the application about a month ago. And it is way better than before. The new file attachment feature will lets you upload several files at once so you can have the customer download one or more files depending on what they purchase. Plus when you upload the file a nice status bar comes up to let you know how long it's taking (thank to swfupload).

One more notable feature is a much needed improvement to the filemanager. You can now upload multiple files at once and watch their progress, because I have integrated swfupload. You can select multiple images now and upload them to your images folder instead of one-at-a-time in the image manager.

This will PROBABLY be the last MAJOR update to version 5. I am going to focus more on version 6, which will be a cf8+ shopping cart system. It will make more use of CFCs and many of the awesome features built into CF8. I will continue to support and make updates to version 5 for quite some time yet so don't get worried. CF Shopkart 5 hasn't ran it's full course yet.

In the months ahead you will be seeing a Version 6 Alpha release posted to the site.

I will make an announcement on twitter (@cfshopkart), here in the blog, and on the forum when version 5.4 is posted. It should be within the next 24-48 hours. I just need to finish tweaking and testing it and making sure I didn't miss a couple of bugs.

Which, reminds me: thank you all who have been submitting the error reports in your control panel. That addition to CF Shopkart 5 has been a HUGE help, and I've been reading and addressing as many as I can whenever I have the chance. This next update is going to fix many of the ones that have been reported. So thank you again for taking the time to click that button ;-)