Hello,

The DotNetNuke Store module version 02.01.48 RC Stable is available at Codeplex!
This version will be submitted to the release tracker ASAP, probably next week. I have to prepare source and submition packages before.

This version contains many improvements, including:

- A totaly new checkout process.
- A new setting 'Checkout Mode' allow the store administrator to define if a user account is required or not.
- Added the capability to sell 'virtual' downloadable products! This feature is available ONLY when the 'Checkout Mode' setting is defined to 'Registration Required' because an account is required to be able to download virtual products. The product form has been modified to allow the store admin to select the file to download, any kind of file can be selected not only zip files! A new 'Downloads' tab has been added to the Store Account module to allow customers to download their products.
- Email templates system has been totaly changed! Now you can use the same token style than in the Text/HTML module to format your emails ([Order:OrderID], [BillingAddress:LastName]...). Only two resource strings are used for each email template, one for the subject and another one for the body. In addition, now the email sent to the store admin can be totaly different than the one sent to the customer. Previously, only the subject was different. And best of all, you can use HTML tags in your templates! I will update the templating guide ASAP to reflect this changes.
- Added token [ULISTPRODUCTS] usable with all product sections to render products as ul > li. When applied in a template, the Rows and Columns of the corresponding section are used to compute the number of products to display. This will be especially useful to display featured products, or even popular products using a plugin like AnythingSlider jQuery Plugin as a sample.
- Added SEO Names in category and product froms, this allow the Store Admin to add SEO names in the URL.
- Support of the canonical URL link standard to enhance SEO.
- The thumbnail generator page has been converted to an HttpHandler to increase performances.
- Added support of Etag header to the thumbnail generator. This allows the browser to save images locally and to reduce the number of requests to the server.
- Several performance enhancements has been done in the code using generic List<T> instead ArrayList and some new caching strategy. Now the minimum DNN version is 4.6.2 because the module implement the IHydratable interface to increase performances. Most of the time, display times were reduced by half during the first call and even in some cases divided by ten for successive calls!
- A new optimized and minimized 'Template.css' style sheet has been added, the previous was renamed 'TemplateDesign.css'. This improvement allows to load a single sheet style (17 KB) instead of four for a total of 31 KB to speed up the rendering of the page and to improve the user experience. The old version allows designers to customize more easily the appearance of the catalog.

To summarize the work done since the last "official" version (02.01.36), 20 bugs were corrected, 11 new features added as well as 25 improvements. Please read the enclosed 'History.txt' file for details.

Merry Christmas!

Gilles

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