Latest nopCommerce 4.2 – Packed with new features and enhancements

The nopCommerce team officially released nopCommerce 4.2 version in May that is packed with a number of features. In this article, you will find an overview of some of the changes (in terms of features) and improvements in nopCommerce 4.20 version.

Significant performance enhancements

nopCommerce 4.2 is the most stable and faster version to date. Significant performance improvement was added to nopCommerce 4.2 by upgrading to Entity Framework Core 2.2 because the previous version of EF had a critical performance issue. Some other performance enhancements include:

• HTML minification
• Faster processing of large catalogs
• Faster processing of pictures stores in Windows Azure
• Faster generation of bundled and minified JS and CSS files
• Faster discount calculation
• Improved performance of “IsCrawler” method used to detect search engines
• Cache is cleared much faster now
• New plugin architecture which do not load uninstalled plugins in memory

Due to all the performance enhancements, now the demo site of nopCommerce gets 100/100 for desktop and 99/100 for mobile on Google PageSpeed Insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=demo.nopcommerce.com&tab=desktop

UI/UX enhancements in the administration area

The nopCommerce administration area has been re-designed in order to make it more user-friendly and easy to navigate. UI/UX enhancements include:

• Switching from outdated KendoUI Grid to DataTables library
• Switching from tab-based layout to accordion (collapsible sections)
• Page layout & design
• Regrouping and reordering of options / fields

Upgraded to ASP.NET Core 2.2 and EF Core 2.2

nopCommerce 4.2 is now based on ASP.NET Core 2.2 and EF Core 2.2 which brings a lot of new features and improvements to the platform (in terms of performance).

• ASP.NET Core 2.2 uses a new endpoint routing system for improved dispatching of requests.
• ASP.NET Core 2.2 adds support for HTTP/2.
• ASP.NET Core 2.2 introduces a Java Client for SignalR. This client supports connecting to an ASP.NET Core SignalR Server from Java code, including Android apps.
• EF Core 2.0 added the ability to model ownership in one-to-one associations. EF Core 2.2 extends the ability to express ownership to one-to-many associations. Ownership helps constrain how entities are used.

Source: https://docs.microsoft.com

Advanced GDPR feature

For helping store owners in making their nopCommerce store site GDPR compliant, a new feature has been added in the administration area that allow store owners to automatically log all the changes with the customer’s profile.

A lot of other improvements, changes and bug fixes have been done in nopCommerce 4.2.

Full list of release notes is available here: https://www.nopcommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx

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About Guest Blogger: Lavish Kumar

Based out of New York, USA, Lavish Kumar is a full stack web developer by profession and founder of Striving Programmers, a resource of nopCommerce tutorials and a trusted community for developers that offers a wealth of articles and forums to assist individuals with improving their software development skills. He’s been a nopCommerce MVP for the past 8 years, winner of nopCommerce award and is passionate about nopCommerce, writing tech articles and building great web applications. Lavish is an active open-source contributor, author of the official nopCommerce designer’s guide and is often found on the nopCommerce forum assisting users to resolve problems. Lavish specializes in custom web applications, e-Commerce platforms, CMS implementation and CRM systems. Lavish’s technical experience also includes development of custom nopCommerce themes and plugins for a wide variety of users and his dedication to nopCommerce is evident in all of his projects.