Here we are! After a long summer of hard work, HikaShop 4 is now released! Let's discover what has changed, what has been improved and what's new.
With HikaShop 4, you will enjoy all these new features :
- Joomla 4 compatibility
- HikaShop works with font-awesome
- New user control panel
- New orders listing
- New add to cart notification option
- Backend address edition
- Image SEO settings
- Multiple or single whishlist option
HikaShop is now compatible with Joomla 4 Alpha 4. We do not advise yet to use Joomla 4 for a production website as there are still many things to iron out until the final release.
However, this means that most of the work has been done on our end to have a fully working HikaShop on Joomla 4, when it is released.
We've replaced the icons in HikaShop in order to use font-awesome icons.
That way, it fits better with Joomla, which also uses it. Also, pages will load faster as there will be less resources to load from the server (one CSS file instead of many small images).
Moreover, it will be easier to create the styles pack and add new icons / button for us in the future.
And finally, it's easier for you to style the icons if you want to and we believe it also looks more modern.
The user control panel interface on the frontend of HikaShop can be accessed by customers through a menu item of the type "HikaShop user control panel" that you can create via the Joomla menus manager.
It allows you to access your orders, your addresses, your profile edition page, your carts, etc.
With HikaShop 4, this page has been completely redesigned. It now has a left side with the buttons to the different areas, and a main area with preview cards of the last orders.
The new user control panel view also has extraData support for developers, so that they can inject their own content before or after each block. Thanks to that, the user points plugin now has a new option to be able to display the total amount of points of the customer on that page.
Similarily to the user control panel, the orders listing has also been redesigned to use preview cards for the orders.
On the orders listing, loading all the products of all the orders would be too taxing for some servers, especially when the orders have a lot of products. To avoid that, and also avoid the listing to be too long, only the products of the latest order are displayed and for the other orders, we've added a button to unfold/fold the product information area with an AJAX process.
We've added a redirect setting to the HikaShop cart notification plugin so that you can now easily configure if the customer should be redirected to the checkout or not after a successful add to cart while still getting the add to cart notification displayed before the redirect is done.
There is also a second option to add a delay before the redirection is done automatically in order to give some time to the customer to read the notification message.
We've modified the addresses edition in the backend user manager of HikaShop to be able to handle billing/shipping addresses like we did in the 3.5.0 release for the frontend address manager for the customer.
You could already edit the SEO data for the images of products, but it wasn't possible for the images of categories yet. This is now over as this release brings the same interface to the categories.
So just edit a category, click on its image and you'll get the popup to enter the SEO data for the image.
The've added a new option "multi wishlists" so that you can now choose to only have one wishlist instead of several for your customers.
This will automatically adjust the different areas of the user control panel, like it does for the single/multi cart. So for the example, the button of the control panel linking to the listing of the wishlists will directly link to the wishlist of the customer if the "multi wishlist" setting is deactivated.
There is a lot more to discover about HikaShop 4.0.0 like Bug fixes, improvements. You will find all these elements detailed in our change log.
While this release brings a big change to the interfaces of the user control panel, there are no major changes to the inner workings of HikaShop like there was with the new cart and checkout systems of HikaShop 3. So we expect a much smoother update for people using HikaShop 3.
Keep in touch folks.
Team HikaShop
