Hi,
2. You can directly install the Essential edition.
A. It means that you can't put the link out there so that anyone can download HikaShop with your purchase. Once downloaded once and installed, you don't need to download it anymore. You can simply use the joomla updater to update HikaShop when we activate it after a release. Also, via the menu Your account->Your subscriptions you can download it without that restriction as long as your subscription is valid.
B. New releases mean new features/improvements. After each release, before we activate the auto update, we have a lot of feedback on the release and sometimes bugs that were introduced by the changes that we made for the new features/improvements of the new version. So we directly generate a new build so that you can download it if you already downloaded manually the update and installed it yourself. If you wait for the auto update, as you should if your website is live, you get the latest build of the current version which shouldn't contain any regression bugs anymore.
C. If you want to apply all the patches automatically, simply download manually HikaShop and install it and that will update all the files at once.
D. There is no such page. We actually want to avoid the hassle for the website owners to update everyday HikaShop because we added a patch in an obscure feature most don't user and which only happens on a specific server configuration. It would create a lot of work for website administrator while it shouldn't be needed since we didn't activate yet the auto update and thus he shouldn't update yet unless he wants to test the new features or start a new website.
Once we publish a new release, all the fixes that were done for the previous release via new builds are added in the changelog of that new version.
You can see the changelog here:
www.hikashop.com/en/support/documentatio...ashop-changelog.html