The Zen Cart development team has released version 1.5.5f

Zen Cart 1.5.5f Released, what’s different?

– Checkout – As a help to people getting PayPal TLS notifications, the CURL Testing tool now reports compatibility with tlstest.paypal.com.
– Checkout – Square Payments support is now built-in. Start taking credit card payments in just 5 minutes! See www.zen-cart.com/partners/square_setup .
– Checkout – FirstData soft-descriptors now optional via module settings.
– Checkout – PayPal – Australia settings explained better in configuration screen.
– Checkout – PayPal IPN-handler posts back over ipnpb URL and now gracefully ignores unrecognized new notification types.
– Checkout – Payeezy module now also accommodates 2-series MC BINs.
– Checkout – Authorize.net AIM – add option to display reason for CVV or date failure.
– Checkout – Authorize.net AIM – improvements to detect always-SSL site configuration.
– Checkout – Credit Card Slamming threshold now customizable via Observer code or plugin.
– Checkout – Internal fix to payment modules to avoid thousands-rounding errors.
– Fix upload-class bug related to filtering desired file-extensions.
– Fix multi-language error (since v155a) in functions_email for PHPMailer.
– Fix possible bug in subdomain handling of secure cookie session handling.
– Fix attribute sort-order rules .
– Fixed – if an invalid or non-existent tax rate was encountered, would get: PHP Warning: A non-numeric value encountered in /includes/functions/functions_taxes.php on line 172.
– Admin: Restored percent calculators on Products Price Manager.
– Admin: Fix a few sanitizer fields to avoid over-cleaning.
– Admin: Update currency-exchange calculators since BOC change.
– Template – Support ISO-8601 style date-of-birth date.
– Template – Compatibility updates to accommodate OnePageCheckout plugin integration .
– Template – Improvements for jQuery conflict prevention, and support older browsers.
– Template – Fix CSS typo in colors.
– Template – hreflang URL correction.
– Template – Fix incorrect use of logo image height .
– Security: CVE-2017-11675 – Low-Risk vulnerability (required your Admin login to be hijacked first). Now prevents exporting to invalid filenames.
– Optimization – Abort ajax requests from spiders.
– Enhancement – Cache-bypass added for certain db queries, so retrieved data is always fresh.
– Utility – Plugin version-check utility optimized to allow specific version-comparisons, and adapt to timeouts more quickly.

We do recommend upgrading and keeping current so you can benefit from these fixes and improvements. Just as important, smaller more frequent upgrades are less risky than bigger upgrades.

Please contact us for upgrade details and pricing.

As your business grows, your needs change. You’ll find you need to integrate and automate processes. One of those processes might require data import or export.

Data Import

The import and export of data is the automated or semi-automated input and output of data sets between different software applications.

Over the years, we have set-up many clients with a system to automate import of product data. In some cases, it was a simple update of inventory from a vendor. It several others, a more complex system of adding new products was created.

When creating a data import that will create new products, several items needs addressed. How will the products be assigned to categories? Will you use the vendor supplied product description (hint: No, write your own)? Will you use the vendor supplied pricing?

We work with you to determine how to match your business requirements with the data provided by your vendor. In the case of one client, they were working with two vendors. Each vendor that their own system to categorize their products. The vendor naming conventions did not meet the needs of our client. They needed a way to set their own categories. The result was a mapping system where they could create category mapping. The category name from the vendor would be assigned to a store category through a custom build admin panel. This allowed them to display products from both vendors in an orderly fashion.

For another client, we created a script that exported orders to a file.  This file was then provided to their warehouse each day. The result was a website that accepted and processed orders on it’s own. A warehouse that shipped orders to their customers. The final step was an update back to the website updating the order status to ‘shipped’ and emailing the customer to notify them. We’ve talked in detail about order process automation and shipping automation previously.

This allowed them to automate the entire order process and allowed them to focus on their customers and growing their business.

Do you need help with integration or automation? Contact Us to find out how we can help.

The Zen Cart development team has released version 1.5.5e

Changes in Zen Cart 1.5.5e include:

• Upgrade PHPMailer from 5.2.21 to 5.2.22
• Update gmail support to use TLS per published standards
• Fix bug introduced in v1.5.5c related to deleting customers
• Add built-in support for new .htaccess rules required for Apache 2.4, so mod_compat doesn’t need to be installed
• zc_install improvements better handling for upgrades from v138 / v139
• zc_install – removed extraneous backticks from upgrade SQL from v154-to-v155
• Bridge compatibility for transition to removal of the ENABLE_SSL_ADMIN constant
• Consolidate to a single upload class, shared between admin/catalog
• Updates to Payeezy and First Data HCO payment modules
• NOTE: There were NO Database Changes

If you are doing what we recommend and keeping current, Zen Cart 1.5.5e is a minor step so please contact us to schedule your upgrade.

If you are using something older and have not upgraded, the reasons to do so keep getting longer and longer. Please do contact us for an upgrade quote. It’s not a question of *if* you should upgrade but a question of *when*.