Apr
21
AbleCommerce has recently released a new version of its shopping cart software “AbleCommerce 7.0.7“. This new version has some great features. Especially the new manager screens.
In this post I am going to explain about three new different types of mangers that we now have in version 7.0.7
Payments Manager
Look into previous builds of AbleCommerce like 7.0.6 and try to make use of payment related operations on orders. You will find it bit hard, especially when you are dealing with more then one order. Let’s say in AbleCommerce 7.0.6 powered store you have 5 orders and you need to capture them. You will be required to open each order one by one, go to payments section and perform payment capture in there. Payments manager brings the ability to batch process payments in AbleCommerce 7.0.7. Also its more easy to locate different payment records using narrowing filters in payment manger.
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Order Notes Manager
Notes manager makes it easy for merchant to track communication between merchants and customers. In previous builds it was hard to keep track of communication done by order notes. Order notes were exposed on order details screens and one can easily overlook some important note placed by customer. Note manager incorporates Full Text Search abilities, bunch of handy search filters one may need while searching the notes instead of just showing list of all notes history from one order. The support of listing read/unread messages increases the chances that merchant will not overlook new notes placed by customer.
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CMS/Webpage Manager
This CMS/Webpage Manager is an attempt to simplify the content page creation in AbleCommerce. I have seen many people in the forums asking how to create some content pages in AbleCommerce. Although we have something similar in the form of catalog webpages that can help one create content pages under categories. For example if you want to create some custom content pages then you can create one hidden category. Then you can create webpages under that category with your contents. Finally you can publish their links to your website in order to allow people see their contents. In past I did one forums post about this, you can find it here.
The problem with this catalog webpages approach is its hard to grasp by a lot of people. For example, the merchant can get himself confused as to why he has to put webpage under a category while he wants it to be on website root. Although allowing the listing of contents in catalog is powerful too.
So we decided to extend the ability of dynamic content pages in 7.0.7 and make them more meaningful. CMS manager allows you crate content pages with custom URLs. You can allow the listing of your pages in the catalog but that’s optional not mandatory. CMS Manager exposes different layouts, in order to support much cleaner HTML output and to lower the learning curve some layouts don’t have in page personalization options. So if some one is more comfortable on code changes like a new developer he can simply alter the corresponding layout master page. These simple layouts also give performance boost too due to less page processing. On the other hand if some one is more comfortable with AbleCommerce in page personalization then you have the layout pages supporting that too. You can publish/unpublish your pages, plus can provide your meta keywords, meta description information for SEO.
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