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VirtueMart, List of Bugfixes:

This is a special release in these unusual times. It was planned as simple version with an optimisation boost and bugfixes for VM 3.6.10, but it became a lot more than that. Many people are affected by a corona stasis. One of our members had to go in quarantine (without being infected) where he had a lot of time tor develop and donate smaller enhancements. Personally, I had been preparing for coming restrictions since the end of February since it was clear that Germany will follow the other countries. My wife and I are now taking care of our children's homework and home-education, which are aged from 3 to 11 and my development time is severely impacted. On the other hand this period allowed to really hard-cook this version in the debug process. It is already in use on some live shops for at least the past 2 weeks now.

The biggest change under the hood are the new optimizations that avoid massive sql requests and use booleans to decide whether we need to load data from an xref table. The technique has some implications, which are described on docs.virtuemart.net http://docs.virtuemart.net/tutorials/development/241-reduced-database-access-by-using-booleans-for-reference-tables.html. When I worked on that pattern for categories, I noticed that we can enhance the loading of a category tree in a similar way. Rough tests with more than 200 categories (organised as years) indicate a 5 times faster loading time.

The customfield_value created a permanent performance bottleneck. VirtueMart now creates database keys shortened to the first 50 values, which is a reasonable compromise between using a customfield_value as a simple information value and using it as a searchable value.

The VirtueMart native Language Switcher, which is currently part of the VirtueMart membership https://extensions.virtuemart.net/support-updates/virtuemart-membership, now works more more reliable after some really hard work on the router. The new language switcher creates any SEF Urls for different languages. This means it can switch between product details or just the account maintenance - of course without landing on the homepage. Maybe not that interesting for shoppers, but of importance for administrators. https://extensions.virtuemart.net/support-updates/virtuemart-membership.

The next milestones are enhancing/fixing the VirtueMart order editing, invoice handling and Joomla 4 compatibility.

Optimisations

enhanced features for shop

enhanced features for templaters/developers

new features for shop

new features for templaters/developers

compatibility for Joomla, Joomla 4, PHP7.4

Fixes

Router

Security

Payment Plugins

When a release is just around the corner, we stop adding new features and focus on testing and fixing bugs. So it's a normal reaction of our members to push their wishes after the release. So this new core has an above-average number of new features for a subversion. There are mainly two different groups of features. Some are like furniture. It is quite simple to add them and it is very unlikely that they break something. It may happen that the new table stands in the way of the rarely used door to the basement. But it is simple to fix. Most of the time our testers catch these issues, but sometimes the central heating door was not tested. The new features are all of that kind. The worst which can happen is, that they do not work.

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VirtueMart 3 component (core and AIO)

Bigger, more complex feature changes are done in the major versions such as VirtueMart 3.6. These feature changes are more similar to changing the room layout of a house, or adding an extra floor, or replacing the roof, and so on. These are changes which require much more testing and these are more likely to break other constructions attached to your house. For example, the beautiful balcony (your one-page checkout).

Sometimes we notice that our house is not really comfortable. Displaying the order details below the order list was a good idea, but if the order list was too long then buyers did not see the order details. The order details open now above the list. This way, the logic makes much more sense. If you scroll down in the order details, you can directly select the next order. These and similar changes can be found below in the list of changed behaviors.

One of them even starts with "fixed an issue editing the order...". This one is a very typical problem with the GUI, the graphical user interface. The difference of design and art. It sounds simple, but it is not easy to create a functional GUI. It is quite simple to create a nice looking GUI, but that only counts at first glance. In the long run, a GUI must work functionally. The whole order editing started as plain edit function without any assistance. When you changed a data, the new data was taken. A rough calculation system was added to help with the simple summation.

VirtueMart 3.6 extended the order editing assisting system. The tax change works by drop-down, but this system was not written for discounts. The problem here was to find an elegant GUI. For example, a VAT does not need to be overwritten. If you select a VAT, you expect a fail-proof calculation. But sometimes a discount is granted according to a certain rule or only as a result of a specific trade. As a result, changing a quantity of a discounted item did not change the discount according to the new quantity. The system accepted the discount the old way, as direct input.

The new system now works so, that the discount is always calculated by the given prices and multiplied by the quantity. However, if some of the required prices do not exist (for example, the undiscounted gross price), the discount value is transferred as direct input for the whole position. So you can still overwrite the discount by simply emptying the gross price. The GUI concepts follows the intuitive idea, that an empty price field is calculated by the existing data. So you can of course also just set the gross price and the discount and you will get your net and final price calculated automatically.

Last but not least the bug-fixes. Sometimes it happens that a "furniture feature" turns out to be a roof changer ;-). The feature "automatic thumbnailing of the 'no image set' image" is one of these types. It led to a cascade of changes in the mediahandler.php file. The feature "remote images" remained silent in its corner and only caused problems there. But the simple sounding "automatic thumbnailing of the 'no image set' image" even caused problems when adding a new media because it suddenly behaved as thumbnail "no image set" image.
Sometimes a bugfix aggravates the problem. In German we use the word "verschlimmbessern", from "schlimm" (sad) and "bessern" (to make better). Test users reported that sometimes payment/shipment methods are not correctly selected in the cart, or not visible for selection. The provided fix solved the problem if categories were not set, but created another one. Adding the extra tests for the case 'on empty' lead to a wrongly used pattern and broke the category conditions.

I hope that I gave a good insight how complex it is to deal with new features, bugs, features removing bugs, and bugfixes adding bugs, and so on.

Thanks to our good community - join us at forum.virtuemart.net

List of new features

Changed behaviour

Enhancements

List of fixes

An unexpected error occurred when updating to VirtueMart 3.6.4 using the All-in-One installer. The error was due to the uninitialized language object. First, we discovered that the VirtueMart files were loaded incorrectly when installing with third-party plug-ins present. But then all of a sudden, even with a completely new installation. The previous installation routine only checked whether the VmConfig class existed and executed the load configuration. The new installation routine also checks the existence of the vmLanguage class.

And suddenly we had a problem with the PayPal IPN. If you google for the problem it is easy to see that it has been a periodically recurring problem. Our IPN function used the DNS records of the domains listed in the white list to check the IP. The new method uses a mixed mode and also checks if the requesting IP is resolved to the domains in the white list.

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VirtueMart 3 component (core and AIO)

Update for 3.6.6: Some third-party developers only include our class VmConfig, but do not execute the loadConfig function. In other places, we check whether the VmConfig class already exists, and include AND executed loadConfig only if the class has not already been loaded. The router and the system plugin for updates now specifically check whether loadConfig has actually been executed.

Changed behaviour

List of fixes

With all the improvements that were included in the release of VirtueMart 3.6.0 in late August 2019, we had also introduced new restriction parameters for payment plugins provided by the core. However, the new core introduced a small incompatibility for older payment plugins and some VirtueMart shop owners were unable to update their payment plugins to work with the new core. But the lively VirtueMart community found a way to get the old plugins working again. There was a lot of input in the development forum and many constructive talks. Great community work!

Great update of the Skrill Plugin

VirtueMart, List of Bugfixes:

Optimisations

enhanced features for shop

enhanced features for templaters/developers

new features for shop

new features for templaters/developers

compatibility for Joomla, Joomla 4, PHP7.4

Fixes

Router

Security

Payment Plugins

List of new features

Changed behaviour

Enhancements

List of fixes

Changed behaviour

List of fixes

List of new features

Changed behaviour

List of fixes