thirty bees 1.1.0 pre-release

If you are like everyone else in our community, you have been wondering what we are up to. What we have been working on the last few months is thirty bees version 1.1.0. It will be the latest, greatest, and shiniest version of thirty bees yet. At the same time we are still sticking to our guns and preserving compatibility with PrestaShop 1.6. Which, for a lot of merchants is a key feature of thirty bees. So I know you all are wondering what thirty bees will be, lets dive into what changes it will have.

Bug Fixes

The 1.1.0 version of thirty bees will have several hundred bug fixes released with it. While we strive for 0 bugs, at this point it is just not possible to clear out the whole bug list. Some are old, they have not been tested against the newest versions, it makes it difficult to know which bugs are actually still preset. Before the release we will go through the bugs and re-certify them, to make sure they are still bugs and not fixed.

I would like to thank a few community members for their help in making the upcoming release as bug free as possible.

As always @getdatakick he is the super star in our community. Not only does he devote a lot of time to thirty bees, he also

@NemoPS for fixing bugs in our new modules, and helping create the new modules that thirty bees will use.

@yaniv14 if it were not for him, we would have horrible RTL support.

@eschiendorfer he is the guy that I try to run all new features or changes by. He is the one that tells me if they are useful or if they would not be worth it.

@SLiCK-303 he has been on top of our new theme and bugs we have introduced with it.

@Jorgemgm he has been very active with pointing out issues with our strip module. As a FYI a refactoring is going on now.

@Matt75 for helping fix a bug with the carrier wizard.

@ziyaindia for various bug fixes to the core and to the blog module.

@chitzmann for a fix on the shop / group context

@mcdado for CSS fixes

@Zengraph for a multitude of fixes across the theme, specific pricing, and coupons

There are people I forgot to mention. I hope I did not offend you, because it was not on purpose. I am just not skilled enough to pull a complete list of everyone that has contributed from GitHub. Don’t worry though, you all will be mentioned in the final release post.

PHP Versions

I have added this because it is something developers will want to know. thirty bees 1.1.0 will be fully compatible with PHP up to 7.3, which is the latest stable and fastest release of PHP at the current time.

1.1.0 what to expect

The biggest difference with version 1.1.x will be the front end theme. The community theme is no longer the theme that installs with 1.1.x, we have moved to the Niara theme. The theme is cleaner, more well designed, and more streamlined than the current community theme. Words are cheap though, right? Lets look at a few screenshots of the new theme.

The biggest thing you will notice on the home page is that we have gone to a full width slider. Its just more common these days, so having a cleaner header and a full width slider just seems like a no brainer. Also on the home page we have moved away from tabs, we are using dedicated sections now, like most modern e-commerce sites.

The product pages are cleaner as well. This is what the new product page will look like.

But wait, there is more…

One thing that we have been wanting to bring to thirty bees for a while is a feature that no other e-commerce platform has. We want shops to be able to use different templates based on the pages. What does that mean though? We are adding a new area to each page type in the shop. What this area will allow is for you to choose a different template on a per page level. The new area will look like the image below.

This new area will be available on the CMS pages, product pages, and category pages. The new theme for thirty bees 1.1.x will sport a couple different choices for each page type. Now it will be easier to customize your site, showcase special products, and create custom pages.

A new module

One of the things we have tried to do with thirty bees is cut down on the dependency of modules. We are phasing several modules out in the 1.1.x branch. Some of those modules are single use modules like the block payment logo, the product payment logo module, blockbanner, blockstore, blockcontact, blockcontactinfos, and a couple more modules.

These modules will be replaced by the new HTML block module.

This module will allow you to have multiple HTML areas in the same hook allowing you to widgetize areas with HTML content.

New hooks

In addition to the HTML Block module we have also added a couple dozen new hooks. The new hooks we have added are all display hooks to solve problems. Hooks have been added to the following areas:

404 Page

Maintenance Page

Category Pages

Product Pages

Payment Pages

Shipping Pages

Checkout Pages

There are also several other hook areas that have been added that will be in the new template files with the new theme, to make them easier to visually customize.

Enough talking about the new features and new looks, lets have a look at this new theme.