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Developers' Digest

New Release: OroCommerce 1.3 Has Arrived

August 1, 2017 | Oro Team

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of version 1.3 of OroCommerce Community and Enterprise editions. Both are now available for immediate use.

For this LTS (Long Term Support) release, the Oro Team focused primarily on enhancing existing functions and completing some new and long-anticipated features. We have also deployed essential performance and UX improvements on the store frontend, and have optimized various current functions related to catalogue management, SEO optimization, and customization.

The following is a brief roundup of all the improvements available in version 1.3 to help give you a glimpse of some of these new capabilities.

What’s New in OroCommerce 1.3

Promotions and Discounts

Promotions are an integral element of B2B customer loyalty programs, as well as one of the most requested features made by our community since the official release of OroCommerce 1.0 last January. To help OroCommerce users harness the power of these incentives, we have deployed a new promotion engine that allows them to configure and create promotions. It’s now possible to apply various discount options to line items and shipping costs, or to run “buy X get Y” promotions. Refer to the extensive Promotions section of our User Guide to learn more about creating, viewing, and managing promotions in OroCommerce 1.3.

Guest Users and Guest Shopping Lists

  • The guest user option enables unregistered visitors or customers who haven’t logged in to create and modify shopping lists.
  • Shopping lists are stored in a browser session up to 30 days and are preserved after the registration. A guest shopping list created by a registered yet unlogged customer gets merged with the existing shopping lists by the same customer once they log in.
  • A guest user profile is created for each visitor. Once they register, their guest profiles are attached to the respective CRM Account as the newly registered customer so that the store admin has a complete view of customer purchases and preferences.
  • The guest user feature lets the store admin remain flexible and stay on top of things. It’s possible to enable this feature anytime and to specify the number of shopping lists guest users can create. Vendors can ensure the store frontend is unavailable to guest users by making  access only available through the login or sign up forms.

In future OroCommerce versions, we’ll expand the guest user functionality and introduce the guest checkout and guest requests for quotes.

Catalog Management Improvements

  • It’s now possible to highlight new arrivals by adding a relevant label on the store frontend. New configuration options have been added to the “New Arrivals” block on the store homepage.
  • To enable individual editing of different page sections without opening the entire product edit page, we’ve modified the product view page in the back-office.
  • You can manually add selected products to the product collections in the web catalog management section. You can also exclude products from the automatically generated lists.
  • The price list generation process has been upgraded with an additional price calculation method that uses the minimum possible price to better comply with the local rules and regulations of specific territories.
  • It’s now possible to assign and display related products on the product view page.
  • When editing product information, catalog managers can use a page template for the store frontend product view page.

Store Frontend Improvements

The following advancements in the store frontend ensure an enhanced customer experience and elevate customer satisfaction via a more customer-centric buying environment.

  • The main navigation menu has been optimized for mobile and tablet devices.
  • You can display contact information of the sales rep assigned to the customer on the store frontend.
  • The “Contact Us” form on the store frontend can be enabled or disabled in the system configuration.
  • The quick order page now includes additional product information to ensure an enhanced customer experience.
  • Customers can now easily duplicate their shopping lists.

Performance and SEO Improvements

The following enhancements are meant to improve your store’s online visibility.

  • It’s possible to boost rankings of your store through its front-end speed optimization by enabling image and font caching, page-source compression, and image compression. Web-server specific speed optimization instructions are provided in the Web Server Performance Optimization documentation section of the Administrator Guide.
  • The new meta title field for products, categories, and landing pages allows to control how your store frontend pages appear in search engine results.
  • The default sitemap file chunk limit has been reduced down to 10,000 items per file for better indexing.

Integrations and Customization

  • We have updated the product API and added the new price list API to improve the way product information and price lists are managed.
  • The default set of back-office workflows now includes a quote management flow with additional approval steps.
  • The custom theme files are now bundled to simplify the creation of new store frontend themes in OroCommerce.

To get more details on these updates, feel free to read the release notes:

To update to version 1.3, please follow the Oro upgrade and clone instructions. The upgrade process is similar for all Oro applications. Please use the orocommerce.git repository or files from http://oroinc.com/b2b-ecommerce/download page when doing so.

Make sure to check our OroCommerce online documentation, which we constantly update to reflect all the new changes, and stay tuned for further announcements soon!

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