The HikaShop team continues to work hard on the HikaShop 4 series. As usual, discover what's new in this article !
To sum it up there are serious new features and abilities with this 4.2.0 version !
First, for the most attentive ones to HikaShop news, you had noted that the last release was the 4.1.0, and the present article is about the 4.2.0 !
We decided to directly call this release the 4.2.0 as there are many big new features and abilities. Now let's detail the main ones here :
- New block for your checkout workflow
- HikaShop filter system now uses Ajax
- New HikaShop Smart Search plugin
- New cookies system
- New finish order spinner
- New address field restriction for the address type
- New order pay page
- RTL improvements
Since a long time, many of you enjoy a fully customizable checkout workflow, it was time to go further!
And for this we have added a new view type, the Separator.
You'll be able to have several columns of views in the different steps of your checkout thanks to this new checkout view !
Note :We've updated our tutorial on the checkout workflow tutorial in order to include this new view, and more specifically the option list, here and some concrete case, here. So be check to check that out to learn how to use that new view.
In the past, when your customer used or changed filter parameters, the whole listing page was refreshed. Now, with the 4.2.0 release, only the concerned parts of the page will be refreshed for a smoother use of your filter options!
We have developed a new plugin Smart Search-HikaShop Products that will enable you to use Joomla Smart Search!
Before that, it was impossible to use Joomla's Smart Search in order to have a search on your HikaShop products, and you would have to use HikaShop's Filters system or Joomla's standard search system. Now, you can just enable this plugin, index the products, and configure Joomla's Smart Search to be able to search through your products with it!
We added cookie support to the cart system so that your guest customers will keep their carts even if they quit your webshop.
The most common case is that your guest customer have created a cart, then for a reason or another, he closes his browser window and comes back to the website a week later.
Before, the guest customer would loose their cart. But now, your guest user will find his cart as he left it, thanks to the cookie support!
We have changed the way the checkout workflow is submit. Before you could only see a spinner inside the next / finish button after clicking on them.
Now, you will see a bigger spinner in the middle of the checkout page, and the possible options will be locked while the page is being processed after clicking on the next / finish buttons.
That way, customers won't be able to do weird interactions with the cart while the checkout is processing the submission and it will avoid some weird errors for them in such cases.
Is it now possible to add a restriction on your address custom fields thanks to the "Type" setting of the custom fields of the table "address".
With this option, you can now make it so that a custom field will only appear for billing addresses, or only for shipping addresses, or for both.
Thanks to the "Payment of orders not paid immediately" and "Allow customers to change their payment method after checkout" settings of the HikaShop configuration, you can allow your customers to pay for not yet paid orders via their orders history on the frontend. It can be useful when you need to review the orders before allowing for the payment, or when you create the orders in the backend for the customers to pay later on, or if the customer wants to change his payment method (for example, he chose to pay by "check" in the checkout, but realise later that his order is delayed until the check is received on your end and thus wants to pay by credit card).
This was already in place in previous versions of HikaShop. However, the payment page you get after clicking on the "pay" button of an order has been redone now to include the total of the order and display the cost of the different payment methods if the customer can change the payment method of the order.
Here, a more specific news for all our customers that use languages like Arabic, Hebrew or Persian or more generally RTL languages. For all of them, we have improved the CSS to handle Right To Left display of the pages.
As usual, there is a lot more to discover about HikaShop 4.2.0 like bug fixes, improvements. You will find all these elements detailed in our change log.
Keep in touch folks.
Team HikaShop
