Been a while since I blogged about CongoCart; been working on a couple large things that have taken longer than I wanted.

However, I have a couple nifty new features that I'm happy to announce:

• Mini Site Lists - This is a embeddable javascript or html that you can embed in another site (like a blog or social networking site) that shows a "miniature" list of some of your products/auctions.
  
• Side Menu Navigation Editor - A simple system to add/modify/disable menu links to the side navigation. File Editor will also automatically create a link for you, as a time saving feature.
  
• Several new configuration items have been added to the site wide configuration.
  
• Added some additional help screens
  
• Fixed several bugs
  
• Banner system now support groups of banners.
  
• Several templates were updated to support classes in the css files to make editing easier.
  

Lets see, first of all I'm happy to announce

• Their are now four more templates you can use for no additional charge instead of the initial default one. They are displayed and instructions on how to install them are available on the forums.



• Next, Discounts; now have the optional support of discounting custom options.



• Also Discounts have the ability to support Categories



• Sales tax is a bit smarter, the customer can use either two letter state names, or the full state names and it will charge sales tax properly now.



• A couple more minor admin screen changes for more displayed information that was requested

A couple new features:

• I've added both Atom and RSS 2.0 feeds for your active last 10 products and last 10 products.


• Added Store Wide and Site Wide feedback


• Updated a couple admin screens to add additional info

We are proud to announce another new feature on the CongoCart site -- the simple FAQ, it has the ability to group by category and allows you to put html in the answers.

We have also added the ability to show the feedback on the products or the products that have received feedback.

In addition, we have done a little bit of cleaning up the template editor preview/save check mode so that it recognizes all the valid commands that the real template system does.

Also, ability to assign a discount to a category, and all products in that category the discount is applied too.

I am happy to announce that a new easier to create template conversion system has been installed, not only does it allow you to use any html program you like; but you can also convert several of my competitors templates into CongoCart templates with little or no modifications required to them. (More Info)

As a designer you can create a complete theme and then you or your client can just upload it and it will apply the images, css, js, favicon, and any templates. (If you are a designer and want a FREE store to develop templates on for your clients please let me know).

In addition since the last post we also added:

• the ability to download your theme or templates, upload css & js files.
  
• Ability to set how many characters the short description uses
  
• Ability to choose if you want pull down lists or free form Country fields
  
• Simplified the Template System Menus
  
• Cleaned up a couple templates
  
• Allowed favicon.ico to be uploaded and visible from the site wide images
  
• Selectable Processing & No Processing on Category Images
  

Been a while since I've blogged. Been too busy to blog, but I decided to take a few minutes and post some of the new things...

Lets see if I can remember all the enhancements in the last couple months.

• Several browse/list screens now have sorting on them
  
• A couple new fields showed up on some of the browse screens
  
• The Order Editor screen can be printed, and it prints out order packing lists for end users now!
  
• Template editor now supports backup all, and download all
  
• You can sort your customizations (w/ ability to automatically sort by the alphabet)
  
• You can upload Category images w/o any processing
  
• Several screens where cleaned up to be a bit nicer to look at
  
• Template editor now has a DIFF view, to see what the differences are between your template and the master template
  
• New Store/Congo checklist has been implemented
  
• Country Editor has been implemented
  
• Feedback system has been implemented
  
• Product Rankings has been implemented
  
• Ajaxified several features
  
• Contact us messages are now also stored in the database so you can makes sure you didn't loose any emails.
  
• Stats screens has more stats!
  
• And probably a ton more I'm totally forgetting about!
  

Well, better get back to coding; I have several more things in the fire...

- Nathan

   Wow, this has been a REALLY busy week, as we iron out the all new features. Not only have we added several smaller requested features like Lotteries to both Products and Auctions; add added a new product based discount to the discount system. We still had time to work on several other features that are almost ready to announce.

But the huge announcement today is we now have, as far as I know, one of the first implementations in a cart ever of:

-= PER-Custom option Quantity tracking. =-

What does this means to you?
Well it should allow you much better inventory management, and easier customization of products.

An example; if you sell several designs of t-shirts, you can create the following customizations;

• 10 X-Large
• 20 Large
• 30 Medium
• and 20 Small shirts

as a select list (we support, checkboxes, radio's, free form text and selects). Then you can link this group of options to each of your shirt designs.

   Now, if Milly checks out with a Large T-shirt of Design A, then when Beth goes to checkout Design B she will see only 19 Large shirts in stock. The QTY is tracked on the actual custom option, if you run out of Large Shirts, that option will automatically vanish from customers list. If you run completely out of T-Shirt sizes, then the Product itself will not allow you to add it to your cart (or check it out since it will be considered out of stock)

   The custom options quantity is tracked very carefully to make sure no overselling is possible; just like we have done on the actual products since our initial version of the cart.

   Hows that for a new feature announcement?

Just finished the system wide Time Zone support -- all administration and customer screens should be updated to use the new timezone code. This will allow you to set your time zone and then all dates will be put into your local time. In addition to a per-user time zone, the "site" has a time zone so that those that haven't put in their time zone it can use the sites time zone as default. Second, we have just added the ability to view past items. You can now set the item as "Past Item" instead of disabled and the item will show up in the past items list. The system supports site wide and per-store past items. The Automatic system has been adjusted to add the ability to move the item to become a past item in addition to the other methods it has.

Got the image sorting code done for Auctions, Products, and Galleries. If you see somewhere else you think image sorting needs to be added let me know. ;-) Also added a Countries editor so you can maintain your own countries. Fixed a couple spelling mistakes, and a couple minor glitches in the admin.

Couple new features worth mentioning this week:

• Added a new email that is sent when a person checks out using paypal; it now includes a link to "retry" their payment in case they crash or paypal is having issues.
• Paypal Order timeout email now has the same link.
• Added Robot/Spider automatic detection code; to detect other robots that have not been classified yet and automatically remove the items in their basket and not let them "add" items to the checkout.