Today we are thrilled to announce availability of Arastta 1.2 "Shkoder" stable. Arastta 1.2 is available for download and update from dashboards.

As you may know, we name our major releases with the city names from all over the world. This time we have a city from Albania: Shkoder.

Arastta 1.2 comes with greate features that announced in our Development Team, we would like to thank to each individual who contributed to Arastta 1.2 with their various contributions (development, tests, bug fixes, ideas and requests...).

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You can watch the following video to have a quick glance for the main new features that Arastta 1.2 brings:

What's new

There are lots of new features and improvements in Arastta 1.2 but here is the quick list for highlighted features:

Separated Menus

For the sake of clarity we divided Arastta admin menus into two parts. From now on you will find eCommerce-related menu items (products, categories, orders, customers, marketing, reports...) on the left sidebar. And you can find configuration-related menu items on the new right offcanvas bar, which can be toggled by clicking on the cogs icon located in the right-top of the page.

So now it's easier to manage your eCommerce store in terms of daily purposes and you can reach to configuration menu items only when you need them.

Basic / Advanced Mode

Our main purpose with Arastta is easing the eCommerce and its whole processes. Since Arastta provides lots of advanced features and settings this may confuse some store owners, especially newbies. So with Arastta 1.2 version Arastta dashboard comes with two different modes: Basic and Advanced. It's always possible to switch between these modes with just one click.

Basic Mode

By default Basic mode is enabled and provides a clean, easy-to-manage interface for everybody. Moreover we provide a better user experience for managing lists (categories list, products list). So we can say that even Arastta experts will love this mode and they keep using it unless they need some advanced features.

Advanced Mode

This is the standard (former) layout for Arastta management. Store managers can switch to this mode by clicking the switcher button in the toolbar and they can reach the advanced (all) features again. This is also where current vQmod/OCmod extensions are applicable.

Invoice Manager

Invoices are very important and a must-have part of the eCommerce and it's very easy to manage your invoices with Arastta 1.2 version. You can navigate to Sales > Invoices to generate, view, download and send invoices via email. Also your customers have an invoice interface where they can view and download their inovices.

Theme Manager

Managing your current themes or adding/installing new ones from the Arastta Themes directory now easier than ever. You can open your settings menu (by clicking cogs icon in the toolbar) and reach the new Theme manager from Appearence > Themes menu.

And you will see all current themes listed on the page. You can click on the Customise or Settings links to manage your themes. Or you can click on the Add new button to install new themes from our marketplace.

Extension Manager

New extension manager (you can find it under the right offcanvas menu) provides you a hub where you can manage all your current extensions and add new ones. Also thanks to new extension manager you can uninstall your extensions permanently. You can get some details about the extensions (version info etc), too.

Offline / Maintenance Mode

Untill now when you enable Maintenance mode, some parts of the store / theme are still displayed to the visitors like header, footer blocks etc. So it was not a real offline mode. And with Arastta 1.2 version when you switch your store into Offline mode, your store's front-end really becomes offline. And only a login form is displayed for the users who don't have admin previliges and logged-in to the store.

Admin Language Switcher

If you have more than one language installed on your Arastta store, it was difficult to switch between them for the admins. But from now on you can switch between the languages with a few clicks.

Readmore Button

There is a setting to limit characters for product detail descriptions on the product list view which is global and effects all product lists. But what if you want to display more or less description for specific products? Now Arastta has readmore button support so you can define your readmore limits per product. You can find and readmore button from your editor.

Arastta Components

Lets party devs. Same as within Symfony Components, Arastta Components aim to serve to the PHP community. They can be used separately from Arastta and installed via Composer. Arastta 1.2 introduces its first component, Arastta Form. Form component provides rapid development of forms through an object-oriented PHP structure.

More:

• Gravatar (avatar) support
• Emails instead of usernames for admins - Username removal from installation
• Send email when out of stock
• Styling on stock status
• Send admin email for return request
• Added robot.txt file
• Download Error log
• Coding standards
• Text Editor configuration page