Blog

After two years of massive refactoring, we finally come up with the 4th generation of the OXID eShop. Together with that, some new structures and workflows have been introduced to our company for improved quality management as well as new patches, updates and upgrades can and will be released in a very short frequency.

The formerly forked development for both variants - Enterprise and Professional Edition - now has been merged again. The new variants (incl. Community Edition) are separated during the built process, which means, that every possible bug has to be fixed once. All of our code has been ported to PHP5.

The whole code has been extremely cleaned up and we cut down most of the huge classes and methods into small and handy pieces. We consistently use unit and selenium tests.

As a result, we proudly offer a sturdy and reliable code base, an increase of the performance (up to three times in relation to former versions) and the possibility to easily enhance our standard ecommerce tool using our proven module system.

Furthermore, we implemented a bunch of longed features, i.e. search engine optimization (SEO) has been increased exorbitantly:

• We use cookies instead of handing over the session by URL now.
• The SEO URL concept has completely been reworked (use of so called “speaking” URLs).
• Content Pages are enabled to be mapped into SEO URLs.
• The Shop will be delivered with a XHTML-valid template set (div-based layout).

The new OXID eShop will come with a package of web 2.0 stuff like RSS feeds, tag clouds and social bookmarking tools.

The admin area has been redesigned and comes up now as a smooth and simple to use administration tool.

At the end of the day, we hand out a sophisticated and state of the art software architecture that is easy to customize, where there are no limits in implementing third party systems and which is ready to use within both, SMB and large enterprise environments with an unrivalled total cost of ownership. It’s a weapon ;)