What's new in nopCommerce 3.50

NopCommerce 3.50 was released on Monday Dec 8th. We have compiled a list of the more important features in the new release. So do read on to see how nopCommerce 3.50 builds upon an already great system and makes nopCommerce even more functional and fit for more and more ecommerce businesses.

Rental products

One of the most notable new features in nopCommerce 3.50 is the support for Rental Products. Any product can now be a rental product. The price of such a product is not final but is for a specified period of time.
If you edit a product in the administration you will see a new Is rental setting. If you check this setting two new settings will appear, which allow you to define the minimal rental period. For example if you specify 2 days for the rental period then the price of the product is for 2 days as shown in the the screenshot below. If a customer rents/buys the product for 4 days since the price is $100 for two days they will pay $200. Please note that for the rental period you can specify - Days, Weeks, Months or Years.

Better warehouse support

The nopCommerce storeowner now has a better control over how products are distributed when they are in multiple warehouses. Now a single product can exist in multiple warehouses as shown in the screenshot below.

Allow a store owner to define custom address attributes

In nopCommerce 3.50 you can define custom address fields and manage them easily from the administration. These fields are available when a customer enters address information during checkout or directly in the "My Account" area.

Allow a store owner to see all existing extensions and themes on the nopcommerce.com market place in admin area.

This new feature will provide you with an easy and convenient way to find and choose Plugins and Themes right from your administration. You are now able to see all the Themes and Plugins from the nopCommerce official site by selecting Configuration -> Plugins -> All Plugins And Themes Directory.

You can also search all local plugins by their group or installation status. For example on the screenshot below we have searched all the 7Spikes plugins that are not installed.

Specification attributes support several new types

Specification attributes can now be of different types like: option, custom text, HTML text and hyperlink. Before nopCommerce 3.50 specification attributes were of type option and the store owner could not change this. Now should you need to add a link to a product as a specification attribute value or custom HTML or any custom text, you can easily do this from the nopCommerce administration.
To do this you need to edit a product and select the specification attributes tab. There you have a new Attribute type property for each specification. Please note that the custom text, HTML text and hyperlink types do not allow filtering.

Topics - include in top menu

You are now able to add topics to top menu, by selecting the Include in top menu setting.

Our Mega Menu integrates with this new setting automatically. So if you mark a topic as Include in top menu the topic will be shown in the Mega Menu.

Shopping cart page - Display how much reward points will be earned

Now your customers will be able to see how much reward points they will earn with their purchase in the shopping cart page.

Display "Download" link for downloadable products on the order details page

In nopCommerce 3.50 a download link is displayed for every downloadable product on the order details page. Previously you could only download the products by going to "Downloadable products" page in the "My account" area.

Now the store owner can attach PDF invoices to "order paid" emails.

Now the store owner can attach static files to any message template.

This could be useful in case you want to send some additional materials to your clients i.e instructions, manuals etc.

Allow a store owner to specify "pick up in store" fee.

Export/import country states.

Previously store owners had to add country states manually. Before creating a new list for your country you can check if this list is not already created by someone else following this link. If it is not present then please contribute yours to the nopCommerce community.

Specify a list of errors (phrases) to be ignored when logging.

You need to add your phrases in 'commonsettings.ignorelogwordlist' setting as shown in the screenshot below. Then all error messages that contain this phrases will not be added in the Log. Usually the Log is full with errors caused by search engines or bots requesting well know urls from Wordpress for example. If you are running a nopCommerce store then you definitely have seen similar errors in your Log i.e The controller for path '/wp/wp-admin/' was not found or does not implement IController. By adding this phrase "The controller for path" then you will no longer have such messages in your Log. Please note that you also need to be careful with this new feature as it may hide some errors that are not caused by bots and make the troubleshooting of the error very hard.

Ensure that topic pages are not SSL secured.

If you open an ssl enabled page like My Account for example and then navigate to a topic page like the About us page you will not open the the About us page via https but rather via http. This is really good because if a search engine craws your page via http and then does the same via https it would consider the page as two separate pages but with the same content thus deviding the weight of the page by two.

Speaking of search engines, in nopCommerce 3.50 they are not allowed to add items to the cart, which leads to generating less messages in your Log.

Discounts. Allow a store owner to specify maximum product quantity which could be discounted.

It can be used for scenarios like "buy 2 get 1 free" but please don't let this confuse you and think that adding 4 items will get you 2 for free. This is because no matter how many same items you add you get only the maximum number of discounted items that is specified in the discount. As you can see on the screenshot below we did a test and added 3 same items in the cart and only one of them was discounted.

Order list page. Allow a store owner to filter orders by product name.

This is a really nice feature as you can see all the orders in which a given product has been purchased. Having in mind that on the order list page you get a summary information based on the selected orders then this can be used to make statistics of how the sales of a given product are going.

Support for new tax rules for European Union from 2015.

Find more info at http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/vat/how_vat_works/telecom/index_en.htm#new_rules

Allow store owners to extend HTML Editor (admin area) without customization.

This is more for developers rather than store owners but if you are a developer extending nopCommerce you will really appreciate it. There is a new "Admin.RichEditor.AdditionalSettings" setting, which is used to pass additional settings to the Tinymce editor used in the nopCommerce administration. So now instead of modifying the Administration\Views\Shared\EditorTemplates\RichEditor.cshtml file you can use the new setting. For example if you want to hide the Toolbar you can do it by adding "settings.toolbar=false;" and this will then be passed to the Tinymce initialization code that will take it into consideration and do not show the toolbar in the editor as shown in the screenshot below.

We would like to remind our customers and followers that all our products are already released for nopCommerce 3.5.

In summary we must say that this is another great release from nopCommerce. There are so many new features in nopCommerce 3.50 that it is really hard for us to mention all of them in a single blog post.
For more details of all the new features in nopCommerce 3.50 you could refer to the nopCommerce Release Note.