What's new in GrandNode 4.50?

What’s new in GrandNode 4.50?

We are happy to announce that the newest version of our free, open source e-commerce solution has been released. GrandNode 4.50 is out and we are very excited about that fact. In each version of it, we want to create breath taking changes, that’s why we can compare our solution with the biggest e-commerce softwares in the industry. And yes, if you haven’t heard, GrandNode has the widest range of features available out of the box and we are very proud about that.

First of all, the most important news for GrandNode developers. The whole application has been rewritten to support only asynchronous methods (async / await). Main benefits coming from mentioned change:

- increased performance and responsivness of GrandNode,

- organized and clean code.

If you create themes, interesting for you may be fact that shopping cart and wishlist have been moved to the independent component, so you are able to easily change their position in your theme without fear that scripts responsible for flyout cart won’t work.

Now, let’s break the bank with updates important for each store owner.

Redesigned admin panel

In GrandNode 4.40 we’ve released the redesigned default theme of GrandNode. In the newest version we were focused on the backend of GrandNode. We knew that it requires few UI / UX modifications to be more friendly for beginner users. As a result we have totalyl refreshed admin theme. We’ve removed the Metronic Admin Theme and implement totally new theme.

We’ve made also few changes in menu grouping. You will find new tab called „Reports” where you will be able to find the majority of reports available to generate in GrandNode. We’ve decided to group few menu items into single one. For example „Manage API Users”, „Roslyn compiler” and „Query Editor” can be found in the „Developer Tools” section. We hope that it will result in the better user experience during the GrandNode use.

Progressive Web Apps in online store? Why not. In the 4.50 version of GrandNode you are able to create a fully functional progressive web app which will work offline with a little efforts. How is it possible? Easily. The only one thing that you should do is to enable PWA directly from appsettings.json file in your GrandNode. Choose the way of caching. You can decide which scenario is the best for you.

Then you need to add your icons and edit the manifest.json file to provide individual information about your store.

And now the best. Staff support. But wait, what’s Staff? Staff is a person, who will be responsible for the whole store. What's the difference between Staff and regular account with limited permissions? The most important difference is a fact that Staff will be able to see and edit only that products, which are assigned to his store. For example, in your multi store configuration you have created 2 stores - Your Store 1 and Your Store 2. You can create two managers with Staff role and assign particular stores to them, as the result - Staff 1 which is assigned to Store 1 will be able to make actions only related with the Your Store 1 and the second only with the Your Store 2.

What can be limited for Staff?

- Products,
- Categories,
- Manufacturers,
- Orders,
- Shipments,
- Return Requests. 

What's important? It's just the core of the Staff management. The whole feature can be extended by a plugin. The whole configuration process will be described in the different, independent article.

Now it’s the time for the smaller, but also very important changes. You can improve the appearance of your products and display the second picture of your image on hover, on the catalog pages. In the case of pictures, GrandNode supports the webp images. So you are ready to beat the performance socres in the Google ranks.

As you may know, GrandNode comes with few free plugins, that are available right after installation. We’ve decided to add two new plugins to the project. You can use the BrainTree payments for free and Google External Authentication.

Implemented in GrandNode 4.40 Web API has been improved. We’ve added support for managing tier prices via Web API. The whole process has been described on our docs page, http://docs.grandnode.com/operations-with-products - last three chapters.

Content marketing is a king. So we all know that is important to have a blog in your store. Why I mentioned that thing? Because we've added possibility to assign products from your store directly to blog posts. So you can write posts with tips and then assign mentioned in post products to it. Simple, but powerful.

Probably you noticed the blog post about „Call me” pop ups (https://grandnode.com/how-to-create-call-me-popup), aren’t you? I described in it the way, how can we create a simple engagement pop up for customers. I’ve faced a little problem during styling error notification and send button. But we’ve created a workaround and now you can insert mentioned two things inside your form as a token, so you can be sure that everything will look fantastic.

We have great news for our users from Poland. We got the pull request with fantastic feature. We’ve added NBP exchange provider out of the box in the GrandNode.

On homepage you can find the new section – New products. It’s simple change, but it allows you to highlight more products in your store. We are convinced that it will be useful in many online stores.

Updated TinyMCE – it’s nicer and it supports video files!

As you may see, we've implemented so many changes, feel free to join us and bring your stores level to the new level.