What a better present for Christmas than another great release from our favorite e-commerce platform. Let's open the box and take a look at the most notable new features in the latest 3.70 version of nopCommerce.
1. Running multiple instances of nopCommerce.
Now it is possible to have multiple instances of nopCommerce running and serving requests while sharing the same database. This means that a single nopCommerce store can run on several web servers at the same time leveraging the power of several machines. In this blog we will use the term "website instance" or "nopCommerce instance" to mean a nopCommerce installation running on a separate web server. Why would you ever need to do this? Imagine you have a lot of simultaneous visits to your website and your web server is heavily loaded. In such cases your visitors may experience delays in their page load times or even worse, your server may stop responding and your website will not load at all. To prevent this from happening, it is a common practice to have several website instances running and handling client requests simultaneously. So when a client makes a request to your store, the request is forwarded to the website instance that is less loaded and that website instance serves the request. A module called Load Balancer is responsible for forwarding the requests to any of the website instances. Remember that a single request is handled only by a single website instance. Let's illustrate this with a simple example. Imagine that we have 2 instances of nopCommerce running and serving requests for Nop-Templates.com. In other words we have one and the same installation of nopCommerce running on two web servers and these two installations/instances are sharing the same database. When you visit Nop-Templates.com, the Load Balancer will forward the request to either one of the two running website instances. This way if we have 100 simultaneous requests to our website, 50 of the requests will be served by the first instance and the other 50 will be served by the second instance, resulting in faster request handling and better response times. Of course this equal 50/50 split is a very simplistic case in which the web servers are equally loaded all the time. In reality the load on the web servers will differ and the Load Balancer will be smart enough to distribute the work accordingly. This sounds great! How can I do this for my nopCommerce website?
If you are hosting nopCommerce on your own servers then you need to have your nopCommerce website instances into a Web Farm, which requires you to have some advanced IIS administration skills. If you are interested in how to setup a web farm you can refer to this article . But if you host nopCommerce in Azure then you can achieve this quite easily. One of the main reasons to run your website in the cloud is the ability to scale when you need to. This is why Azure offers a great multiple-instance support that you can configure with a few clicks in your Azure portal. Please refer to this article that explains how to scale your website in Azure. Regardless of how your nopCommerce is hosted, multiple instance support would not have been possible without these newly introduced nopCommerce 3.70 features.
2. "New" products in nopCommerce 3.70 NopCommerce 3.70 removes the "Recently added" products, which used to automatically show the last added products and introduces "New" products instead, which could be hand-picked by the store owner. To add a given product to the list of "New" products, the store owner needs to check the "Mark as new" setting in the administration of the products.. In this way store owners have complete control over the list of new products. They can even control how long a given product should be in the list by specifying a start and end date.
3. Enhanced discount support
4. Better CMS and SEO support
NopCommerce 3.70 improves on its already powerful CMS and SEO functionality by adding a few handy features.
5. Better customer and order management
NopCommerce 3.70 adds several important new features to its customer and order management system.
5. Enhanced product attributes management
NopCommerce 3.70 adds several important new features to its attributes management system.
6. What's new for the nopCommerce developers
As usual nopCommerce 3.70 comes with more than a hundred bug fixes and refactorings, the details of which you can find in the nopCommerce issue tracker on codeplex . Among these there are a few new things that I would like to briefly mention.
7. Miscellaneous we love
NopCommerce 3.70 comes with many small fixes and improvements. Here are a few of them.
I hope this blog post has given you plenty of insight of what's new in nopCommerce 3.70 and provided you with enough motivation to upgrade to the new version. All our nopCommerce themes and plugins have already been released for nopCommerce 3.70. Remember that our plugins have a trial version so you can take them for a spin anytime you need to. Our themes on the other hand have stunning demo websites . If this is not enough for you to try nopCommerce 3.70 and our products you can always to contact us for more information or a pesonal demo.
We have even more exciting nopCommerce products coming in 2016. So do stay tuned!
But before that, enjoy the Holidays and we wish you a very happy and successful New Year!