Hi all,

First of all, great work on CC4, it has many features built in as standard that I would expect of a decent cart these days.

Yes I was initially surprised to see that you needed to buy a license to start using it as I got used to CC2 and CC3 being free initially. This was a surpise but not a shock as such. After seeing the feature list and how CC has grown since CC2 I am happy to pay for CC4.

My only concern....upgrades and how they work.

I have 2 stores, one is using CC2 but heavily modified (heavily !!). The other was using CC2 as well but has been scrapped some time back and now using CC3.

The problem I face is upgrading between different versions of CC and different maintenance versions of CC (i.e. CC 3.0.16 to CC 3.0.17) it is far too difficult if you have made any mods.

I'm reasonably techy, I know how to use merge tools etc but I do not see why we can't have some kind of happy medium.

Take for example forum software e.g. SMF forum software. I have a modded SMF forum and if SMF release a maintenance release they will automatically tell you on the admin screen of this release and how to go about upgrading to it. The release is automatically downloaded and tested against all the core files and mods you have made. Before any upgrade is performed you can see what was tested and the outcome and you can choose to upgrade or not.

It is so easy, a few clicks if all goes well and considering I have added a few mods to that forum, you can understand why I would love to see a feature like this added to cubecart as I get really wound up having to go through merging etc like I have done so when upgrading from CC 3.0.16 to 3.0.17 just because I added mods like the SEO mod !

This doesn't mean I am not getting CC4...I am actually going to ditch my CC 3 store in favour of CC 4


p.s. before anyone says modding etc is really hard I have to say yes it is but ....you might want to look at other web software such as phpBB then you will see how phpBB and the modders have worked together to have modding standards which make it really easy for those implementing mods to upgrade phpBB and the 3rd party mods. I run several phpBB/SMF forums and constantly have to upgrade them, phpBB has always had security issues and yet it is far easier to upgrade than CC...I think the next step for CC is to really consider how it will deal with upgrades because if there is a CC 5 out one day, i won't be a happy guy if I need to scrap my CC 4 store and rebuild the site again.

The major difference is that phpBB (Which I certainly recommend) is open source, whereas CubeCart is a commercial system.

I do believe that a system like phpBB's easyMOD that automatically integrates suitably annotated modified code into the existing code would certainly be a dream.

As someone who programs MODs specifically for my customers, but does not release them separately, I have the job of having to update files whenever an update is released. I have a files list of which files have been changed, and then reference this to the files changed in the update. If there are any matching files, I will simply alter those files. The process is fast, and efficient, and I can then update all my customer systems in one go, without them even realising. Having mentioned this, a feature requesteady for a changed files list be made available whenever there's a version change has been made, so hopefully it'll be acted on.

With regards to upgrades, there are instructions on how to upgrade a CC3 store to CC4.

There is also a detailled instruction on the 4.0.1 update telling you how to apply the changes.

It's all getting there, some room for improvement, but certainly getting better all the time.

There are also some upgrade instructions in the documentation here.