4 and Beyond: a Brief Overview of the CS-Cart Roadmap

Konstantin Molchanov (CS-Cart team) June 3, 2013June 5, 2020

“Change is the law of life
and those who look only to the past or present
are certain to miss the future.”
John F. Kennedy

Hello,

Today, I would like to take a chance to share our vision regarding the CS-Cart evolution and future perspectives.

In this post, I will try to convince you that the path CS-Cart has chosen will make for better backward compatibility, flexibility, and wider functionality in the future, as well as will allow CS-Cart to go higher than ever.

The Present

CS-Cart 4 will be a milestone release introducing some innovative features. Not only is it a breakthrough for the CS-Cart software of now—it will also be our flagship for the future.

To keep pace with time and create a reliable basis for future development, we have made some serious core code changes in CS-Cart 4. These changes will be beneficial for both our own CS-Cart development team, making for faster development with strong backward compatibility, and for everybody who customizes CS-Cart for their own needs or creates commercial add-ons and storefront themes:

PSR as the coding standard will provide third-party developers with a familiar development environment.
Usage of namespaces makes it easier to understand the CS-Cart core functionality and use it in new add-ons.
The new directory structure is more logical and easier to navigate through.
The new approach to storefront skins will allow developers to create highly customizable themes that will work across future CS-Cart versions with minimal changes.

Of course, these changes are significant, but they are necessary to keep CS-Cart modern and fresh. By accepting these modifications now, we can avoid making significant core changes in the future; CS-Cart will be able to evolve gracefully and deliver better backward compatibility in the long run.

Theme editor and Image zoom — Live Theme editor and the beautiful Image zoom are new in CS-Cart 4.

Now, let’s take a look into the future and the next big step for the CS-Cart software (after the upcoming 4.0.1 release)—version 4.1.

The Future

CS-Cart would never be where it is today without a strong and supportive community. Creating a welcoming environment for community members, both existing and new, is one of the top priorities for CS-Cart 4.1.

To keep our community growing and attract more independent developers, we are creating a marketplace—a place where third-party developers will be able to present and promote their add-ons, themes, and all things CS-Cart to a wide audience of store owners.

Establishing a project of such scale will require serious improvements in the CS-Cart source code related to the add-on management, including storefront-based add-on activation.

Additionally, we plan to do some serious work regarding the checkout routine—allow separate checkout for vendors and improve usability.

CS-Cart API, first to be introduced in version 4.0.1, will be improved and used more widely.

I hope that our vision is now more clear and that you will better accept the latest turns in the CS-Cart path. We really care about the community’s opinion, and we hope for your understanding.

With all the necessary changes introduced in versions 4.0 and 4.1, CS-Cart will offer better version compatibility, easier upgrades, and a great open community for new third-party developers.

We believe that CS-Cart has chosen the right path, and we, the CS-Cart development team, as well as our clients, have a very bright future ahead. Get on board!

You can ask us any questions right below in the comment section.

Thanks!