OXID eSales Blog

OXID eShop 4.5.0 Beta is Released with Totally Revamped Store Front Design

Ralf Trapp — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 09:02:12 +0100

The latest testing release of our PHP-based open source OXID eShop ecommerce system brings in a new state-of-the-art store front design.

It includes

a clean layout,
interactive roll-overs for navigation and products,
a grid, double grid and line view switch for lists,
image carousels,
tag clouds,
support for user-generated content (UGC),
easy social media and multi-media integration,
cross-sells of related products,
and much more.

The shopping cart’s new user interface utilizes Smarty templates and some AJAX magic with jQuery. Template 'inheritance' allows the creation of chained templates, providing new great possibilities for those who create themes. There's even more: Theme creators are now able to inject theme-specific options into OXID eShop's admin interface and make life for shop owners easy and convenient. Seeing is believing, so check out the two fully customizable sample themes that are included with OXID eShop 4.5.0 beta.

The future will bring a theme and module installer for easy and quick fully automatic one-click-installation of new themes and modules. OXID eShop 4.5.0 beta already has all the functionality to show the ideas behind it. Theme and module installation has never been easier!

Download the beta version of OXID eShop 4.5.0 now. Until the stable version is available, we'll keep you posted about further screencasts, tutorials and latest information.

The entire OXID eSales team wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Oh, yes, and here is your present: http://wiki.oxidforge.org/Releases/4.5.0beta

Introducing Beta Tests and Changing the Update Cycle

Ralf Trapp — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:54:24 +0200

At the beginning of this year, we published a new page on OXIDforge to inform you about the development process of OXID eShop. In this document, we announced "approximately one patch per month and one update per quarter" whereupon usually patches contain bug fixes and updates contain new features and bug fixes.

Now, in a tight co-operation with the community, we will modify this procedure by introducing basically two changes starting with OXID eShop version 4.6.0:

Open beta tests will be introduced for updates. That means we will publish a beta version 4.6.0 for testing purposes only. This beta version is not intended to be used in a productive environment! Everybody is welcome to check this versions for bugs and to report them in our bugtracker. Patches will be published without a beta version.
The second change is about the release cycle. Due to the additional beta time, we will expand the release cycle of updates by another month. Thus, new updates of OXID eShop will be published every four months instead of once a quarter from version 4.6.0 onwards. Patches with bug fixes will be published once a month further on.

Hope you like this new modus operandi :-)

OXID eShop 4.4.0 with Private Sales, Live Shopping and Facebook Features

Ralf Trapp — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:49:38 +0200

I am extremely excited to announce the immediate availability of our latest release: OXID eShop 4.4.0. It allows small, medium and large businesses to leverage innovative dynamic sales models on the Web and tap into the word-of-mouth marketing power of social networks. Oh yes, version 4.4.0 rocks :)

Innovative Dynamic Business Models

With the new release, you can create members-only shops, offer one deal a day, set a basket expiration time for live shopping sites, get products recommended on Facebook, and more. All of which in combination with the existing, typical eCommerce functionality, allows shop owners to more easily and better:

Retain and attract new customers with persuasive social eCommerce
Provide purchase incentives with limited time sales and restricting catalogue browsing
Raise the visibility of your shop through viral marketing and minimize overall marketing spend
... and ultimately raise revenue by lowering costs with innovative new business models!

There are exciting times ahead of us and that includes not OXID eSales, the vendor of OXID eShop, but also you, the users of OXID eShop who constantly seek for new revenue streams or optimizing existing ones. Nothing stops you from starting right away:

Freely available advanced eCommerce features: All new features, such as Private and Group Sales, Live Shopping as well as Facebook Integration are included in our Community Edition and thus freely available.
Reliable platform for new business models: The new features make OXID eShop the Open Source eCommerce platform of choice for those who want to implement social commerce business models that are both radically new as well as ready for mass adoption.
Speed up innovation while reducing risks: Now, you can significantly speed up innovation and separate your shop from the competition without the risk of huge upfront investment.

Modular Social eCommerce Features

Let me walk you through some of the highlights of the 4.4.0 release and I am sure, you'll share my enthusiasm:

Private and Group Sales: Using the private sales feature, merchants can implement shopping clubs or group and event shopping. Registering to the shop, the member for example now can reserve products. He can see which products there are in the cart and when his product reservation will expire.
Facebook: Using the Facebook integration in OXID eShop, customers can log in to the shop, recommend products, discuss and comment about them. They may share their most favorite products with their friends via the "Like" button.
Promotions: The feature "actions and promotions" enables merchants to better respond to their clients preferences. In the administration panel, it is possible to configure discounts for certain products and to control time frames and addressees of the promotion.
Invitations and bonus points: The invitation function includes a credit point system: merchants can reward their clients that recruited other online purchasers to leverage viral marketing tactics. He can individually and flexible configure how to refund this credit points.

These are just some of the great new features included in the latest release. You can combine all of them in multiple variations due to the modular, flexible and open architecture of OXID eShop. There's no need to decide whether you want a traditional Online Shop or a membery-only Shopping Club. Just take the bits and pieces of functionality that match your business model as well as target audience. Feel free to build custom functionality on top of the Open Source code to add unique value for your customers.

Start today with building a unique and innovative eCommerce site: Learn more about OXID eShop 4.4.0, download it, try it out.

New Quality Report

By the way: Along with the new shop release, we also published the latest Quality Report. It clearly shows that we never sacrifice quality for adding new features. The code coverage by automated Unit Tests for all editions of OXID eShop increased again at over 90%. Thus, our product's quality is significantly higher than the 80% advised by experts for critical enterprise projects. Download the detailed OXID eShop Quality Report for free.

OXID Commons Shows Strength of Commercial Open Source in eCommerce

Ralf Trapp — Tue, 25 May 2010 11:39:20 +0200

Let me share my impressions and the highlights of two days OXID Commons 2010 with you:

Keynotes: Innovating on top of an Open Source eCommerce Platform

In his keynote on the first day, Björn Schotte, CEO of Mayflower GmbH, said that “OXID is an amazing example of how commercial open source drives processes and innovation at a stunning speed, while at the same has positive effects on the enterprise market at large.” He emphasized that an open source eCommerce platform like OXID, “will unleash innovation that boosts development and benefits vendors as well as software developers”.

OXID's CEO Roland Fesenmayr seconded this opinion, while he looked back on two years of commercial open source. He presented our company's achievements and introduced our vision for the future, concluding that our decision to go open source has been proven right: “Modular and open e-commerce platforms are the future.”, he said. “They are the fundamentals on which individual vendors will build their business strategies on. We at OXID are convinced that technology needs to follow business models, not vice-versa. Platform-independent crosslinking and seamless integration of cloud computing services will gain more and more importance.”

New Features: Facebook, PayPal Clearance Management, DHL Shipment Managemnet

Many new features and services have been announced during OXID Commons 2010. OXID eFire, our eCommerce intelligence platform, will soon see support for third-party applications through web services, notably clearance management via PayPal or interaction with DHL logistics for shipment managing.

Also noteworthy is the new and exciting Facebook integration for the upcoming eShop release 4.4.0 that Erik and I presented. By enabling potential customers to order, recommend and discuss on products directly via their preferred social network platform, shop vendors will soon be able to deliver shopping experience not only to their website's visitors, but to millions of social network users worldwide!

Plenty of Presentations on a Myriad of Topics

Many other sessions at OXID Commons – amongst them lectures, workshops and open discussion panels – took place in two tracks, covering a wide variety of eCommerce related topics. While I, of course, expected presentations on topics like software development, extensions, system integration, business models or cloud computing, I was especially fascinated by the talks on usability thoughts and new design aspects for online shops, which will lead to improved default templates in OXID eShop 4.5.0. Or, as Johannes Altmann of Shoplupe.de put it: “Usability is about passion!”

Business Networking and Socializing with 300 Participants

In total, about 300 guests participated in the Freiburg sessions, and about 1,000 joined us remotely via our live video stream and Twitter feed. I not only met shop owners, but also integration partners, agencies, lawyers, developers, and of course lots of my fellow OXID colleagues – jointly talking about the future of eCommerce and shopping in its legal and economical aspects, sharing minds and thoughts, with everybody bringing in their experience and own views on things.

At the end of the first day, OXID invited everyone to its famous “Get Together“ at Freiburg Bar, where discussions and networking continued into the night.

First OXID Unconference Ever with In-depth Tech Talks

One innovation of this year's event took place on the second day: The free OXID Unconference. In contrast to the scheduled talks of the day before, participants spontaneously organized sessions themselves and were free to propose any topic they were interested in, while OXID took care of rooms, wi-fi, coffee and all the other little things you need to survive. Each of the approximately 30 participants was also a presenter, and coordination took place via our wiki. Topics ranged from code quality and the agile development process to update mechanisms and technology trends. To put it in a nutshell: The Unconference was new to each one of us, and it was lots of fun!

Download Slides or Watch Video Recordings

Those of you who didn't attend are invited to download the slides and watch the video archives.

I enjoyed this year's OXID Commons very much, and hope to see you all in Freiburg next year! I'm keen on seeing what we have achieved in a year from now, and what new trends and developments we'll talk about in 2011...

OXID eShop 4.3.0: Expected to be Awesome

Ralf Trapp — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 11:30:49 +0200

OXID eShop 4.3.0 is launching, and my favorite part is that it's a bit of an anti-climax. Nobody in the community is surprised about when it's coming out, what's in it, and what's been left out.

The reason for this is our new communications strategy. For the entire development cycle of this release, we collaborated and communicated with the rest of the community at every step. When we were researching features, we surveyed the community. When we were choosing them, we put several up to a vote of the partners. This is the first release of OXID eShop where the community directly influenced the core feature-set. I enjoyed working on the product for this release, but I enjoyed working with the community even more.

Out of the features the community voted for this release, I love two of them. The first one to really excite me is Rich Snippets. By automatically generating rich text, not only does this functionality improve the ability to search shops built with OXID eShop, it also improves visibility for shop owner's products on major search engines! This already accomplishes two of the top ten things our partners care about. OXID-based shops will have a much easier time marketing themselves with this elegant and useful feature.

The other feature I fell in love with is even more exciting: OXID eShop now autodetects a user's default language from their browser, and displays a fully localized store! Never again will the user search painfully through a foreign language, looking for the button that returns text to "normal". Now, OXID eShop will already know the best way to speak to you. And with the broad range of languages that OXID eShop already supports, it's a snap for shop owners to add new languages as international audiences buy more and more from their shop!

Finally, the last piece of awesome news I have to share with you is also expected. This is the 3rd major release since Version 4.0. It is also the most mature and stable release we have ever had. We ran Unit Tests yesterday, and Community Edition scored 92.11% coverage! We want to help every member of our community hit this gold standard of reliability, and so we are releasing code and instructions so that anyone can easily run Unit Tests on their modules. With these tools at your fingertips, your module can attain Enterprise-grade reliability on your startup or even volunteer budget.

Working with the community over the course of developing all this has been a great joy for me. I feel like the OXID eShop community is gaining major momentum, and OXID eSales has found a valuable role within it, able to collaborate at the heart of this ecosystem. My job has never been this fun.

oxchkversion v3 Released: Enhanced Consistency Checking Tool for OXID eShop Upgrades

Ralf Trapp — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:24:09 +0100

OXID eSales' support department often helps administrators that have issues when patching or updating OXID eShop to a latest release. I remember the days back when I was an OXID Partner and I once called support with this kind of problem. I was absolutely sure I had transfered every single file of the new software version. Well, support proved the opposite.

After I joined OXID I created the first version of a consistency checking tool labeled oxchkversion to never make this happen again. The tool worked pretty well, but had some issues itself. In the beginning, it could not detect the difference between an OXID eShop which was patched cleanly and a shop which was screwed up. For shops which were installed from scratch it worked well. For those which ran for longer, it detected more and more update errors on each patch/update. Of course, for the tool to be useful, something had to change.

We later defined these requirements for a new version of oxchkversion:

It should detect reliably if a shop is a "clean" installation or not – even if some files originated from earlier installations. As long as these files were not released anew, they have to detect as OK.
The tool should give useful hints if mismatches were detected.
It should catalogue everything which was released.
It should create and maintain a database of checksums for each file easily and in one step during new releases.

With these requirements in mind, we started work on version 2, which we used only for testing purposes within our support department. Pretty soon, we knew what had to be improved and we started to develop a new major public release. The result: You can now download oxchkversion v3 for free at OXID eXchange.

Basic Architecture

The shiny new oxchkversion consists of three parts:

A Web service which is queried for answers about specific checksums.
A MD5 database which is hosted by OXID eSales. This database contains MD5 checksums of every piece of software we release for distribution.
oxchkversion.php itself; all in one file.

How It’s Used

Version 3 of oxchkversion works just like v1 and v2: Just copy oxchkversion.php to the root directory of OXID eShop and open it in a browser (e.g. http://www.youroxideshop.com/oxchversion.php).

Then:

It detects your eShop edition, version, and revision from OXID eShop.
It collects all the files which reside in shop and computes MD5 checksums for each php and tpl file.
It then connects to the webservice and transmits this information for each file:
- Filename to be checked
- MD5 checksum
- Version detected
- Revision detected
- Edition detected

When running oxchkversion, this is the kind of output it provides:

If the checksum matches the shop edition, version and revision, a file is marked OK. When this happens, no other information is printed.
If the checksum does not match shop but is recognized as part of OXID eShop, the file is marked version mismatch.
If the checksum does not match shop but is known as a file which has been in shop at any previous time, it's also marked as version mismatch. This means: Files which were in shop in ancient times but are not in there anymore are detected as version mismatch.
Totally unknown files are ignored.

All files which were detected as not OK are printed out in a list. A details link leads to more information:

filename,
MD5 checksum,
from which package the file came from and
what package contained a newer release of this file.

That’s it! I hope you like OXID's consistency checking tool and it’s useful for your daily work with OXID eShop.

Roadmap for OXID eShop 4.3.0: Mostly community-driven features planned

Ralf Trapp — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:55:39 +0100

Happy New Year! Now that the holidays are over, I want to talk about the plans for the next major release of OXID eShop.

Thanks to the newly introduced feature request tool, we now have metrics for gauging the community's wishes and so this marks the first mostly community-developed roadmap. Of course, number of votes wasn't the only criteria the team took into account: When we introduced the tool at the Partners Day 2009, some decisions were made together with the partners taking part in this workshop.

Please note that this roadmap is always subject to change. OXID eShop version 4.3.0 will include the following enhancements:

In some countries (e.g. USA, Japan, Canada), the address format contains a field for entering the state/province. Payment services like PayPal treat this field as mandatory, and may refuse payment if no value is set for state/province. On Partners Day, we were told by several shop owners that delivered to these countries that this is critical functionality for them. In OXID eShop 4.3.0, consumers will be able to choose their state/province from the order process in the shop front end and this field will be available to be handed over to any interface.
Our highest rated request was to "Add the possibility to upload one base picture". In order to implement this request, and close bug #1550 (Icons are not generated when pictures are uploaded via FTP), the new version will prompt the shop administrator to upload the picture with the highest resolution first, and all other picture sizes will be calculated from this one by default. Alternatively, it will be possible to upload a different picture for any other size if you wish.

Excluding products and categories from vouchers has not been possible until now and will be introduced with version 4.3.0 of OXID eShop as requested. At first glance, this functionality looks low priority, but it becomes really essential when dealing with legal stuff like book price control.
During the last year, forum users very frequently asked how to switch off special parts of the front end from the admin panel without touching the templates. As agreed at Partners Day, options will be included in the admin panel for switching the following design blocks off or on: OpenID, Partners and Seals, credits and OXID logo in footer, Compare Products, Recommend Products, Listmania, Wishlists, Gift Registry, Social Bookmarks and Price Alert.
Another piece of functionality requested and chosen on Partners Day is "Put more than one product from the product list view into the basket with a single click". This feature doesn't need functional changes in OXID eShop, the templates themselves would have to be adapted. Since this may affect the clear template structure, it seems safer to implement this as an extension.
At the moment, a field for an European Article Number (EAN) is provided in OXID eShop which is not very useful outside of Europe. In order to clear this up, an additional input option for other article numbers will be implemented. This feature was also suggested and decided upon on Partners Day.
When it comes to "intelligent search" enterprise shopping cart features - like FACT-Finder provides - it becomes essential to increase turnover. With the new upcoming version of a related OXID eFire module, we will provide three more templates for an optimized display of the (after) search results as well as automatic search result optimization. Also, when using the FACT-Finder black box in-house instead of the hosted solution, the ability to access the internals of the black box will be provided from now on.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Google's Webmaster Central Blog announced "Rich Snippets" last year. OXID eShop will support that using RDFa from version 4.3.0 on. Not only do Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance, they also most importantly boost your search engine optimization if you use Rich Internet Applications (RIA).
All demo data in OXID eShop database have been translated into English. After choosing the English language in the setup routine of version 4.3.0, the shop comes up with English as the default language.
Also, we have solved some painful issues with the setup procedure, especially the well-known problems with .htaccess and file permission issues while installing on some operating systems.
For quality management of OXID eShop's code functionality we use PHPUnit, a framework that makes the writing of tests easy as well as the functionality to easily run the tests and analyze their results. Up to now, we haven't published our Unit Test code because tests for the different editions had not been separated yet. With 4.3.0 and onwards, we will support developers by making our PHPUnit tests available to the public.

OXIDlab launched

Ralf Trapp — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:39:24 +0100

Today we launched first application of OXIDlab at OXID eXchange.

OXIDlab is where we publish prototypes or test implementations, which are prepared by our teams. These results of our daily work are very often the first steps to new features for our products. Sometimes they just stay experimental. However, feel free to use it for your own purposes and if you like you can even join us in developing them at http://dev.oxidforge.org/.

Consider software in OXIDlab as being experimental for early product development. We just want to share with you - from developers for developer. If you like it, please vote for it to show, that we should include it into OXID eShop standard software.

Posted by:

Ralf Trapp, Head of Development

Michael Keiluweit, Development

Patch 4.1.2-18998 of OXID eShop is released!

Ralf Trapp — Thu, 14 May 2009 17:26:59 +0200

As usual, we fixed a lot of bugs (see https://bugs.oxid-esales.com/changelog_page.php) again. and implemented a couple of new stuff. What probably is especially interesting is the handling of external pictures from now on: No mingeling the code any longer, just a quick entry into the config file - and here we go :-)

As we have the new community dev site on now, we switched the place of the community downloads and you can find the patch for updating from a previous version to the brand new 4.1.2-18998 here: http://www.oxidforge.org/wiki/Downloads/18998. Much more comfortable, is not it?

Have fun updating your system!

6 days left to release of OXID eShop4.1.0. First preview

Ralf Trapp — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:54:21 +0200

I returned after holidays, checked progress and OXID eShop team did an excellent job. OXID eShop is basically ready to ship. Just final finish is currently being done: Those things like final translations, QA is manual double checking for possible issues and similar.

We've also tested against PHP 5.2.9. This was pretty easy: Just installing PHP 5.2.9 and running tests. As expected, no errors appeared. But now we are sure that OXID eShop is compatible to PHP 5.2.9.

As we've introduced UTF8-Support which covers language files and database, it's possible to choose at installation time if you plan to use UTF8

However, it's also possible to switch after installation. In this case you have to use the instructions we provide and do it manually, instead of letting our installation procedure do the job.

Since a few releases OXID eShop checks at installation time if system requirements are matched. From OXID eShop 4.1.0 on, OXID eShop also checks system requirements and database collations when logging into admin.

You instantly become aware if something is not right. This is very useful if you move to another hoster or your server infrastructure was updated or changed.

Language handling was introduced into admin. See preview below. Now shop owner can handle languages far more easy than before. Adding and sorting languages is easy as never. Just add it and OXID eShop does the job.

Regarding performance using many variants OXID eShop was accelerated much. On a standard developer's machine (Windows XP, CPU 3 GHz, Pentium,
2 GB RAM) and a database containing 4500 products having 77500 variants we could reach the performance values below. In brackets values of OXID eShop 4.0.1.0:

- Loading Start page: 1.5 sec (10.1 sec)
- Details page: 2,6 sec (10.5 sec)
- List page: 2.41 sec (10.49 sec)

I'm really looking forward to next Wednesday when we can release it :)!

Ralf Trapp
Head of technical product management