Reasons to update to 1.5.7

[swguy]

A great bug fix I didn't even know about was done in 1.5.7: go to Admin > Catalog > Categories/Products and do a search. With the demo data, you can search for "key".

You'll get both categories and products, but in 1.5.7, the admin knows there are products in the list and allows you to sort by product fields, such as price and model number. This is very important for some stores (especially those with a lots of SKUs).

Great job by the team on the 1.5.7 release! Please add your own #ReasonToUpdate on this thread.

[dbltoe]

Many background changes were made to the responsive_classic template to make it compatible with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) out of the box.

If you use this template as-is or cloned, you may want to evaluate your final product and then develop an Accessibility Statement based on your_template.

Why is this important for your site? In 2019, there were over 11,000 lawsuits filed against US websites for accessibility. Nearly 5,000 in California alone.

Those of you in the EU will be required to meet these standards by September of 2020.

You can use the Web Developer extension for Chrome to test your site. Under Tools, click on Validate Accessibility.

Note that some Validation Result Alerts are actually a good feature for an e-commerce site. Redundant title text(s), alt text(s), and links mean Zen Cart is putting the info in front of the customer every way possible.

A common cause of errors in current versions of Zen Cart (including 1.5.7) is when the #indexDefaultHeading (Congratulations!) and greeting (Welcome) are not used in the #indexDefault portion of the centerColumn and left blank in their define(s). This causes the browser to see and empty h1 and h2 where the Congratulations and Welcome would normally go.

The docs contain instructions on how to change the two and will soon address leaving them blank and it's effect on Accessibility. Currently, the best solution is to figure out something to actually be in the Congratulations define and (if you really want nothing in the Welcome) turn off the Welcome display in the admin under Configuration > Layout Settings > Customer Greeting by setting it to 0.

[swguy]

Yes! Thanks for all your help getting us up to spec on this.

[brittainmark]

Just finished recoding one of my mods for product location. In 1.5.6 I had to modify 17 core files Now I only have to modify 3. Thanks to all the extra notifiers.
Great Job Guys.
Thanks

[swguy]

Thanks for your mod!

[swguy]

Nice enhancement in 1.5.7 - each of the dashboard widgets is its own file, just pulled in to admin/index_dashboard.php. So it's super easy to change the dashboard order and layout, and even to add your own new widgets. C'mon modders - get to work and build some cool new plugins!

[dbltoe]

Nice enhancement in 1.5.7 - each of the dashboard widgets is its own file, just pulled in to admin/index_dashboard.php. So it's super easy to change the dashboard order and layout, and even to add your own new widgets. C'mon modders - get to work and build some cool new plugins!

Being the mod moderator, how about a list of those now included in 1.5.7 to prevent folks from "double loading"? I know Display Logs caught me at first.

[swguy]

Looking in admin/includes/modules/dashboard_widgets/ we have the following:

BaseStatisticsDashboardWidget
OrderStatusDashboardWidget
RecentCustomersDashboardWidget
RecentOrdersDashboardWidget
SalesReportDashboardWidget
SpecialsDashboardWidget
TrafficDashboardWidget
WhosOnlineDashboardWidget

[swguy]

Here's a screenshot of the commit graph for Zen Cart. The gray region on the right is 1.5.7 - from initiation to release. A commit is a change to the software repository - adding, updating or removing code - to make Zen Cart better. The volume of commits is the Y axis (with the X axis being time, of course).

You can see clearly that there were *hundreds* of improvements made in this time, and that in fact, the project has never been more active. I encourage everyone to upgrade to 1.5.7 as soon as possible.

[swguy]

In Zen Cart 1.5.7, the functionality provided by the "EZ Pages in Sitemap" contribution is now built-in.