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File Difference Reports?


Nikki72

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I'm just wondering what's happened to the file difference reports that were provided upon new releases? You've provided them for every one up until 5.1.1 and now nothing again for 5.1.2. These make such a difference for those of us who have customised our skin and without them it's a nightmare having to go through all the code to find the changes.

Can we have them back please?

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Bsmither was nice enough to post a link to one a few days after v5.1.1. Hopefully CC or Bsmither or someone else will help out with this soon. It's certainly needed!!

I know and i'm sure there are thousands of grateful cubecarters but isn't it really the responsibility of the software developers?

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"Responsibility"? Such thing is debatable.

I would like to see a Software Developer's Kit (SDK) for Cubecart. Is it Devellion's responsibility to produce one? Debatable. Right now, I have to reverse engineer the code, which is probably a concrete violation of the license.

I (everyone, actually) would like a comprehensive User's Manual. Is it Devellion's responsibility to produce one? In this case, I would say this is not debatable. The best we have so far is a series of help screens. Is this sufficient? Debatable.

Will a concerted effort by the user base (what there is left of it), by crying out and gnashing of teeth for such documentation, have any positive results? Doubt it.

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I'm testing Beyond Compare3 right now as a way to find individual file differences for my own upgrade cycle. But there doesn't seem to be a way in that program to turn the information into a useful report that I could share here. If someone can suggest an "inexpensive" program that would churn out a file difference report for all of a CC install I'd be glad to use it and share the results!

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We've all been demanding a userguide since the release of V4 and i'm sure i read someone that there would be a developer guide for V5, none of which have appeared to date. I do believe it is the developers responsibility to provide a comprehensive userguide for their commercial software. I'm not a developer, just one of the thousands of license payers. Until Devillion include more professional templates most of us have to modify one of the existing ones to give our shops a more professional look so whenever a there's a new release we have to take time out of managing our business to perform manual upgrades which is much easier when a file difference report is provided.

May be i'm just old fashioned in believing when you pay for commercial software you expect there to be extensive documentation to go with it! I've had my shop since V3, upgraded to V4 but when V5 was released and i found it had been completely rebuilt, including a different template system i was put off the idea of upgrading as i didn't want to take the time out of running my business to learn a new templating system to integrate my current design. Before upgrading to V5 i played with OpenCart and CS-Cart and both were frankly more professional solutions, both have extensive documentation including developer documentation and OpenCart is a free opensource cart! The only reason i conceeded to stick with CubeCart was simply the extra work involved in moving everything over but the most important thing in both of those examples is that they have extensive documentation provided by the developers, not their customers, even the FREE option!

So in short i do believe it is the developers responsibility, more so when you have to pay a license fee to use it!

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There is some user submitted documentation on the third party forums, but this is pretty basic. Regardless, as has already been mentioned, the developers should be the ones to provide complete documentation considering CubeCart is commercial software. I would like to see something comparable to LemonStand's documentation. LemonStand is also commercial software and their team originally consisted of just two developers. We should remember though that any time spent writing documentation would come at the expense of further development - and the current rate of development isn't exactly quick.

OpenCart is quite different. Being open source, OpenCart has a considerably larger user base and the community can contribute towards both the development and the documentation.

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The last two releases haven't had the traditional file difference report due to software issues from our supplier being compatible. You can get Beyond Compare from www.scootersoftware.com for free and make one. It will take minutes.

As far as documentation goes there is a help link on every page of the admin control panel of your store and info at http://www.helpdocs.info as well as knowledge base articles for the most common questions.

Dirty Butter - It does. You need to put each version in then expand files/folders and use the "?=" button to do a binary comparison. One done you need to use the file menu to select all files. Only after just files are selected will it allow you to export a file difference report.

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OpenCart is quite different. Being open source, OpenCart has a considerably larger user base and the community can contribute towards both the development and the documentation.

CubeCart is 'opensource' too in the sense that 99% of the code is not encoded, thus allowing developers to build modifications but the majority of the documentation has been provided by the developer, not the community although obviously the community have contributed over the years as have the CubeCart community.

As far as documentation goes there is a help link on every page of the admin control panel of your store and info at http://www.helpdocs.info as well as knowledge base articles for the most common questions.

Although even that is quite basic Al with some things missing.

A file difference report has now been added after reinstalling Parallels / Windows 7.

Fantastic thank you! :yeahhh:

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The Upgrade message on Admin shows the new version is v5.1.2.2, but the new message and file difference report Al has added shows 5.1.2.1. And there's no link to the patched version in the announcement, either.

There was an annoucement but it was then deleted but the download is now 5.1.2.2

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