Improved Licensing

We have made significant improvements to our licensing system. First and foremost, skins running Standard Licenses should continue to function indefinitely should our website go offline for whatever reason. We did previously build in some level of contingency, but this did not account for domain issues on our end. The new licensing code built into our new skin releases (more on this later) now scrutinizes the response it receives from our server. If the response from our licensing server is not known, it is discarded and the skin will continue the function indefinitely.

License Reissue

You can now reissue any of your licenses at any time. This allows you to use the skin on a completely different domain than where it was previously installed. You no longer need to ask us to update your license. License reissue requests are immediate and performed at the click of a button through the new Client Panel.

Authorize Additional Domains

You may now authorize up to 10 addon domains on a single Standard License. This is useful if you want your store to be accessible through a number of different domain names. If you're using a shared SSL certificate, you should now be able to authorize the secure domain. The only requirement is that the addon domain points to the same CubeCart store as your primary domain (as per our licensing agreement). Domain authorizations can be made through the Client Panel.

If your licenses have been migrated from our old Client Panel, you may find that you are unable to authorize additional domains initially. If this is the case, you will need to reissue your license and visit your store in your browser (having updated the skin by following the instructions at the end of this post). You should then be able to authorize additional domains.

New Help Desk

The Help Desk is now completely integrated into the Client Panel. You can open technical, sales and pre-sales support tickets as before.

Instant Order Processing

Orders are now processed immediately pending an automated transaction fraud review.

Skin Updates & Accessing the Client Panel

We have released updates for all of our CubeCart V4 skins. The new releases use our new licensing and can be downloaded through the new Client Panel. We have migrated all the existing Standard license orders made through our old Client Panel. To login to the new Client Panel, you will need to reset your password. If you find that any of your standard licenses have not been carried over, please open a support ticket so that we may manually add them to your account.

Unfortunately, we were unable to migrate over any Rebranding Licenses. If you have purchased any rebranding licenses, please open a support ticket so that we may manually add them to your account.

Updating Your Skin

We highly recommend that you update your skin to the latest release. You should not loose any changes made to the skin if you follow the procedure described below:

Download: the latest version of your purchased skins through http://my.shopdev.co.uk

Extract: the skin directory from the downloaded .zip archive

Upload: the /php/ directory from within the extracted skin to your server (overwriting the old /php/ directory)

Find: your new license key by logging into the new Client Panel and selecting "My Licenses" from the navigation at the top of the screen

Insert: your new license key into the designated area in the skins/SKIN_NAME/php/license_key.php file on your server

What's so great about CubeCart V5

In previous releases, skins were mostly comprised of static assets. That is to say that the template files were pure XHTML & CSS. Any dynamics were achieved using JavaScript. Interactions (through extensions) with the CubeCart core was achieved using a complicated system of JavaScript and PHP files, where the output of a PHP file was loaded in through AJAX. In some cases, such as with the AJAX shopping cart, this was a logical development path. It made perfect sense. However, this is not a viable option for implementing small additions such as table zebra-striping, conditional content and general enhancements.

Such additions were implemented through modifications to CubeCart's core PHP files. This made updating CubeCart a long, tedious and rather complex process. CubeCart V5 tackles this problem on two fronts:

• Code Hooks (that's plug-ins to me and you)
• PHP template files

These two "features" allow us to implement enhancements in a way that was just not possible previously.

Have your say...

As always, we will be forging a number of nifty enhancements into our skins. We hope to include some of the old favorites (AJAX Add To Cart, Speed Optimization etc.), along with a number of additional tools/features:

• Dynamic Search Suggestion
• Color Theme Builder (more on this later)
• AJAX Pagination & Sorting
• Flexible Product Grids (more on this later)
• Super Category Navigation
• Content Slideshows

We are also considering dropping IE6 support. Do you think that this is a bad idea? Do you have any feedback, suggestions or recommendations for us? Please do let us know your thoughts by posting a comment below or opening a support ticket through our Help Desk.

If your free trial was in any way affected by the down time, please open a support ticket through the Help Desk. We will then extend your trial period for a further week. Full "single usage license" versions should not have been affected. If you operate a single usage license and did experience some downtime, please ensure that you performed a full upgrade when changing from a free trial version.

Our ordering system was also hit, with one file becoming corrupted in the process. This has now been recovered and all parts of the website (incl. ordering system and skin demos) are now online.

Deleting the local license key file

If you are operating a free trial license and experience an "unable to communicate with licensing server" error message, please delete the following file on your server:

• /includes/extra/shopdev_local_key.php

This file will be regenerated automatically shortly after. You do not need to delete it again.

• Improved administration panel interface
• Action Hooks: Easy Plug-In installation
• Scriptaculous replaced with jQuery library
• Skin configuration files
• Traditional SpamBot replaced with ReCpatcha /w customizable theme
• Importers for transferring from CC4 and possibly other shopping carts (e.g. Magento)
• FCKeditor replaced with something less irritating (possibly TinyMCE or CKEditor)
• Utilization of AJAX
• Improved caching
• Support for multiple databases (e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite etc.)
• Improved search engine friendly URLs
• Continuation of the dreaded xTemplate library
• Dynamic image scaling
• Improved postage/shipping
• Support for all the gateways present in CC4 (and possibly one or two more)
• Customer sign in with OpenID
• Product image zooming and lightbox support
• Product options with stock levels
• Customizable pagination links - finally!
• Product reviews on the same page as the product - no duplicate content penalties

It should be said that some of these predictions are based on comments by the developers. I'm also hesitant to say that the stock skins may not support IE6.

ShopDev Upgrade Policy

We provide updates free of charge across a major release (i.e. V4.x - V4.y). There will be an upgrade license fee between major releases (i.e. V4.x - V5.y). Please note that we will not release any CC5 skins until we deem the software to be as stable as reasonably possible. This does not mean that you'll have to wait until CC5 is production ready.

If you have not already updated your CubeCart store, please ensure that you have applied these security patches:

• V4.3.7: Update to viewProd.inc.php
• V4.3.6: Update to cc_admin_session.php

Our CubeCart V4 skins are not completely compatibe with versions V4.3.4 and V4.3.5 due to the way in which the ReCaptcha spambot detection was integrated. Fortunately, the CubeCart developers recognised this issue and CubeCart V4.3.6 and above are completely compatible with all of our CubeCart skins.