Merchello 1.7.0

Merchello 1.7.0 is a pretty big release for us. The entire back office JS (Angular) has been refactored moving Merchello into it's own Angular module. The back office now builds similar to Umbraco's back office via Node and Grunt task runners and is testable with Karma.

The main difference to Umbraco's build is that we require Ruby to be installed as well due to our preference of SASS over LESS.

We've addressed quite a few issues explained to us by the community including:

• Multi-Currency Problems
• Localization issues
• Removed the sidebar child nodes in the section tree in lieu of Tabs similar to those commonly seen in Umbraco back office sections.
• The Merchello solution now includes a working version of Umbraco with a Merchello install for easier testing. This is the Merchello.Web.UI project.
• We've reintroduced the Merchello.Web.UI.Client project which builds the /App_Plugins/Merchello folder.
• JavaScript models, resource, services and controllers have been broken into many more files for maintainability and are combined into far fewer files resulting in a much smaller package manifest.
• Formal design patterns have been used in the JavaScript including the Prototype, Revealing Prototype and Revealing Module patterns. You can learn about these on plural sight if you are interested. http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/structuring-javascript. These models are built by use of builders as described in this post http://odetocode.com/blogs/scott/archive/2014/03/17/building-better-models-for-angularjs.aspx (we just took the concept a bit further).
• Custom line items have been more thoroughly tested and are now exposed properly in the back office UI (Sales Overview Page).
• Discount line items have been more thoroughly tested and are not exposed properly in the back office UI (Sales Overview Page). This will be expanded in our next major release.
• Issues with Notification Messages have been tested and corrected.
• Introduced the new Order Status of "Open" to indicate when an order has shipments prepared but not shipped or delivered.
• Extended the shipment screens to allow for editing shipments, editable (and view-able) origin and destination addresses, deleting shipments and changing shipment statuses.
• Extends the Merchello Customer section adding an Custom Address tab which allows for easier manipulation of customer address information from the back office.
• Merchello TypeFields are now serializing correctly in back office ApiResult data from Merchello Api Controllers.

Things to note BEFORE UPGRADING

• I've updated the screen shots on the product page if you're interested in taking a look before you upgrade.
• If you are using any custom providers for Notification, Payments, Shipping or Taxation you will need to make sure any back office dialogs have been updated to work with the new JavaScript patterns. The providers themselves should work fine - it's the editors and configuration dialogs that may be affected.
• There is a single database change - a simple insert of the new Order Status "Open"
• Sample reports have been updated to the new JS patterns - but our documentation http://merchello.com/documentation/getting-started/how-to/report has not been updated (it's on our list).

AFTER UPGRADING

• You will need to rebuild your Merchello indexes as there have been changes to certain fields.

Things we could use:

• If anyone is inclined, we could use some assistance cleaning up CSS styles in the back office.
• It'd be great to get a dashboard design for the Reports section.
• Please continue to give us feedback and track issues.