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DotShoppingCart Suite V4.5 is released.
DotShoppingCart Suite 4.5 is now available for purchase. The major features include Vendor Management, Multi-vendor support, upgraded to ASP.NET 4.0 etc. See the full feature list.
DotShoppingCart Suite V4.0 is released.
DotShoppingCart Suite 4.0 is now available for purchase. The major features include Silverlight charting report, Form module, Photo block, XML bulk product export/import, templated product detail page etc. Check the full new feature list.
DotShoppingCart Suite V3 is released.
DotShoppingCart Suite 3.0 is now available for purchase. It has tons of stuff that people are waiting for. The major ones are the full multi-language support, unlimited product custom fields, product bulk import, site admin UI improvements. Check the new features in V3.
Migrate DotShoppingCart Suite V2.1 to V2.5
Before you apply these migration steps please make sure you back up your database and files web\web.config & DSC.config.
 
Here are the manual steps to migrate DotShoppingCart Suite V2.1 to V2.5.
 
1) Migrate database 
Download migration SQL script and apply it to your V2.1 database.
 
2) Update web.config and DSC.config
    a) Replace string "OpenSource" to "Commercial" in web.config and DSC.config
    b) Remove table based shipping and table based tax configuration (see yellow background below) in DSC.config
<shippingServiceConfiguration defaultProvider="">
        <providers>
            <clear />
             <addenabled="True" sortOrder="0" name="Table Based Shipping" type="DotShoppingCart.Commercial.Shipping.TableBasedShippingProvider" />
        </providers>
</shippingServiceConfiguration>
 
 
<taxServiceConfiguration defaultProvider="">
 <providers>
    <clear />
    <add name="Table Based Tax" type="DotShoppingCart.Commercial.Tax.TableBasedTaxProvider, DotShoppingCart.Commercial.Tax, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null" />
 </providers>
</taxServiceConfiguration>
 
    c) Compare web.config and DSC.config in V2.5 to the existing ones and bring the new changes in V2.5 to the existing ones.
    d) Go to Store admin and configure table based shipping and table based tax again
Create FAQ Page By Using Hierarchy View
For things like FAQ, knowledge base or online documentations DotShoppingCart has a built-in module "Hierarchy View" for these. In this article I am going to describe how easy to create a FAQ page.
 
In your site admin, go to Content -> Content and click "Add" button to create a content group.
 
 
Make sure you change the Default View to "Hierarchy". See the arrow sign above.
 
After you create the FAQ content group, click "View" button and you will be brought to the FAQ page. Check the URL of the FAQ page. It will be something like <your site>/View/Hierarchy/FAQ.aspx. You could use the relative link "/View/Hierarchy/FAQ.aspx" in any page or menu.
 
You can see the FAQ page that was just created.
 
 
Then you can use the highlighted the icons above to start creating the entries in FAQ.
 
If you need a live example of FAQ page, check DotShoppingCart FAQ.
DotShoppingCart Suite V2.5 is released
DotShoppingCart Suite V2.5 has been released. The last version of DotShoppingCart Suite V2.1 was about 6 months ago. Now DotShoppingCart Suite has been kept up with its On Demand service sibling enjoying the new features.
 
Here are the links to the new features included in this release.
 
What's next?

We are now doing the feature planning for V3. If you saw our roadmap before, you would probably notice that we have some high level parts.

  • Multi-language support
  • Integrate Silverlight into site admin
  • Live Talk

Lot of people like our page editor. I really want to see the page editor to support drag and drop. If you know Popfly, you will know what UI it should be. Doing it in HTML is really hard to implement and maintain. So the current plan is to use Silverlight for the next version page editor. The chart reports stuff will be implemented in Silverlight as well.

Ads tracking and integration is another feature in my mind. I recently checked GA (Google Analytics) and found out it is very sleek. You can use it to track other online ads not just Google Adwords. So I think we will just keep our user tracking and statistics at very high level. You can view these when you log in to the store admin. If you need full detail then log in to GA to find out more. We will probably provider in site search report to give you some insights how people search inside your site.

Live talk is another usefully tool to engage with customers. We will investigate if it's worth to implement it.

Another very important feature for ecommerce is able to do A/B test on pages or maybe a group of pages such as multi-page checkout or one-page checkout. This is probaby over the scope of V3. But it's must-have feature to survivie in the modern ecommerce contest.

Let us know what features you would like to see in the V3.

DotShoppingCart Suite V2 is released.

Check out the V2 new features.  Read more

DotShoppingCart Public Edition V1.1 is released

DotShoppingCart Open Source Edtion V1.1.0000 has just been released. Here is the list of the new features.

Major New Features:
1) New Payment module: PayPal Standard
2) Enhance the Theme and Color management. Now total 20 theme and color combinations are natively supported.
3) Enhance site layout configuration. Be able to change the size of images and product grid via store admin.
4) Use Google Analytics style GridView
5) Upgrade to use ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Version 1.0.10920.0
6) Remove the dependency to SQLConfiguration and use configuration file for site configuration

Full source code is now released. Enjoy!

DotShoppingCart Public License V1 full source code is now released at CodePlex. The remaining external dependencies are as follows. If you would like to compile these externals yourself, please follow the links to download the source code.

BlogEngine.NET was crashing on me

I just got the first comment from Zack and the BlogEngine crashed. I had to debug and fixed the bug related to SQL data provider. So if you see it crashes again, please stay with me. Maybe I will rewrite BlogEngine someday.

DotShoppingCart turns into open source project

DotShoppingCart is now an open source project. The license is based off MPL 1.1 plus the term to display DotShoppingCart logo display. More information could be found at here.

Recent Comments
danny jones said ...
Hi... I am inexperiance to build up ECommenrce type sites.I have a little bits knowladge ...
molakaj said ...
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jane said ...
Thank you for this useful information.
furnace parts said ...
Congrats on V4.0.....It is so easy to use  
Travis said ...
I just bought DSC Suite V4.5 and it is more solid then ever. I hope I am #1 buyer of this ...