Happy Holidays!

You know Dasher, and Dancer, and Prancer and Vixen? Me neither, but I hear good things about them. Speaking of good things...

Squirrelcart v4.5.0

Version 4.5.0 is now available. It includes a few bug fixes, and a whole sleigh load of new features. It just *barely* fits down the chimney.

Zones

Zones let you group locations by country, state, city, postal code, or postal code range.

See the zones a customer is located within at a glance, on their order record:

Other Shipping Improvements

FedEx Web Services updates

We've updated to the latest version of FedEx Web Services, and added some new FedEx features like FedEx One Rate®, along with new packaging types and other improvements.

Better control over shipping couriers and services

You can now restrict whether a courier or its services are enabled, using zones and rules. This happens before your rates and service rules are checked, giving you an easy way to disable a courier or individual services at a higher level than before.

Major SEO Improvements

We got under the hood and added some great new SEO features to supercharge your store's search engine and social networking performance.

More control over metadata

You now have full control over the page title, meta description, and meta keywords tags for all store pages, including: product, category, search, checkout, account, order history, content, module, and just about every page in your store.

You can also add a storewide prefix or suffix to all page title, meta description, and meta keywords tags. This works great for adding your company or store name to all pages. For example, you could make every page's title end in "Figgy Pudding", or begin with "Frankincense".

Facebook Open Graph

Open Graph is an open protocol created by Facebook. It is a standard which allows you to add additional meta tags to a page to aid other systems in understanding that page.

When Open Graph meta tags are present on a webpage and you share that page on Facebook, Facebook uses those tags to help determine how to handle that page. By adding Open Graph meta tags, Facebook can better handle your pages. While created and used primarily by Facebook, it is also used by other systems.

Schema.org Microdata

Schema.org Microdata is an open standard similar to Open Graph. It is used by many search engines and other systems. This is Google's preferred means of specifying metadata. Using Schema.org Microdata on your pages will help Google and other sites better understand your pages.

When enabled, Squirrelcart will automatically add the correct Schema.org Microdata to your pages, using a combination of <meta/> tags inside the <head/> tag of a page, and tag attributes throughout the page.

This is how Google interprets Squirrelcart product pages with Schema.org Microdata enabled, and our Reviews module installed:

Note that Google correctly identies the page as a product, along with average rating and pricing info!

Twitter Cards

Canonical Links

Pages may have a few different URLs that point to the same page, for filtering results, sorting, changing page numbers, tracking affiliate links, etc...

This may cause search engines to treat those page variants as duplicate content. To prevent this, Squirrelcart automatically sets a canonical <link/> tag on these pages, pointing to the correct master URL for these variant URLs.

For example, if you are tracking add clicks to a product page via a custom parameter like adclick, you may want to send a customer to a product page like this so you can track the ad click via your web statistics software:

If this page is indexed by a search engine, it looks just like the version without the adclick parameter and looks like duplicate content. For the above example, Squirrelcart will automatically add this link to prevent that from happening:

Prev and Next Pagination Links

When viewing a category or when viewing search results, if more products are available than will fit on a page, that page may contain page navigation links to navigate to other pages in the data set.

Search engines may see these pages as duplicate content. To help search engines understand pagination, Squirrelcart implements one of two different features, depending on your settings.

For data sets that do not contain large numbers of items, Squirrelcart adds a "view all" link:

For data sets that do contain large numbers of items, Squirrelcart adds rel="prev" and rel="next" links:

Bulk Print Your Orders

You can now bulk print orders in the control panel. Just select the orders you wish to print, and choose the print record action. They will all open together for printing, with page breaks to ensure each order starts on its own page.

Additional Product Data

Other Improvements

• Database backups now take up less space, and less memory to create and restore.
• New (optional) Birthdate field added to account and address forms.
• Country records updated to comply with recent ISO-3166 changes.
• Easier to manage related record views, for viewing products within specific categories, users in certain groups, etc...
• New Brand and Manufacturer flags for categories allow you to better organize your products
• Search for products in the storefront by Brand and Manufacturer

For a full list of changes, see our version history page.

How to get this version

Squirrelcart v4.5.0 is now available for download on our Downloads page, to all customers with active download access.

You can check your download access status here.

Has your download access expired? You can renew it for an entire year for only $85 USD by purchasing a Download Renewal.

Switch to Squirrelcart Pro

If you are a regular Squirrelcart user, you can change your license to Squirrelcart Pro for the difference in price. For a comparison of the two versions, see this page. If you'd like pricing or more information, just reply to this message.

Follow us on Facebook

Please "like" us on Facebook. We will periodically post info about new features, special discounts, pictures of your neighbors wearing festive party hats, and other fun stuff.