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Right on time for our Partner Day on October 27th, we released the major version 4.2.0 of OXID eShop. Besides some bug fixes, awesome new features were introduced to all editions:

• Multidimensional variants were newly introduced. This new functionality enables OXID eShop to manage variants of a product. For example, a red T-Shirt can have different sizes. Our Product Management's requirement, to support up to five levels, was proudly
  surpassed nearly without any performance loss.
• With supporting APS (Application Packaging Standard), it will be easily possible to install OXID eShop on a hosted environment of a provider using this format with a single click. APS is a format designed to help implement Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business models for all industry cloud service providers and independent software vendors.
• A Template Override System for an easier design customization maintenance was implemented. A new option sCustomTheme was added to config.inc.php for this reason that you have to fill with the value of your choice, e.g. 'custom'. Now, make a new directory with the same name (custom) and structure as you know it from basic and copy all of your adapted tpl-files to this location. The shop will now look up if there is an adapted file in your custom folder; if not it will return to the basic folder. This works for included files as well, for directory based resources (CSS and JavaScript files) just copy the complete tree to the custom theme folder. Hope that will make the developers life much easier.
• Also, the language management from administration panel was made less difficult. Before, only four languages where provided in OXID eShop from the admin area. If you wanted to have a fifth language, you had to define new database fields. From now on, the shop will automatically take over this job when you create a new language. Deleting that language will not delete the created database fields but will set them back to the default value instead.
• All used 3rd-party libraries like JPGraph and YUI where updated. Like announced to the dev-general mailing list, the YUI library could be made much more lightweight by cutting parts not used in the shop. So the download size of OXID eShop Community Edition could be decreased from 12.2 MB to 10.2 MB now.
• As Zend Platform was replaced by a new product called Zend Server, the appropriate interface was updated in the new version of OXID eShop Enterprise Edition. Both, Zend Platform and Zend Server are supported from now on.
• Nice and helpful popups with additional information where built in closed to input fields in admin area. Check it out clicking on the "?" buttons you will find there.
• In close cooperation with our SEO specialist and due to new SEO expertise, some changes in this concept where made: The rel="nofollow" attributes were removed from most of the links. Furthermore, article links will be built for each category an article is assigned to. A canonical link in the details page will lead to the article's main category.
• While fixing a bug (#0001368), a log folder was introduced.

You will find the update files for OXID eShop Community Edition along with the release notes in OXIDforge's download area. Make sure you have a look at your templates: In this major update the basic templates were changed.