Drupal Commerce Blog

What's happening in the world of Drupal Commerce.

Drupal Commerce 1.6 Released

This evening I released Drupal Commerce 1.6 after a fun sprint of last minute bug fixing and feature postponing. My condolences to those whose favorite upcoming features didn't make the cut. : )

The last release of the core Drupal Commerce project was just shy of two months ago. In that time I've had the pleasure of committing 50+ patches from 34 different contributors (including myself). Over half of the contributors to this release were first time contributors to the project, and together they helped us close out 25+ bug reports, bringing our active count down to a mere 26.

Can't wait to hit the mythical issue queue zero!

What's new in this release?

  • The default Orders View now sorts by last update instead of order number, which was never a reliable sorting method given the way Drupal Commerce handles shopping carts.
  • A Revisions tab to order pages, letting you see a tidy log of changes made to the order by the customer during the Add to Cart and Checkout processes and by administrators during processing:
    The new Order Revisions tab in Commerce 1.6.
  • An improved payment method administration interface along with Order tokens that print out the title of the payment method used by a customer during checkout.
  • A pluggable API function for determining the "default" product on a product display / Add to Cart form.
  • A new option to limit the number of products shown in product reference widgets (rolling back the hard cap of 50 that Commerce 1.5 introduced).
  • Performance improvements to product field injection (only injecting fields / inspecting field info when necessary) and to the Add to Cart form (reducing the amount of data in the form arguments that in turn get stored in the form cache).

Laudable bug fixes

  • Changing the default appearance of the Orders View also finally fixes the "unfortunate" default sort that View has had, a textual numeric sort based on the Order Number (e.g. 3, 2, 10, 1).
  • Thanks to peterpoe for the patch that allows radio button attribute field widgets to use HTML like their edit form counterparts.
  • Thanks to KarenS for sticking with me in an overdue issue and pointing out the way to, get this, ensure we never install with missing fields again. That's a bold (well, "em"phasized) statement, but I'm happy to make it and be proven wrong. I really think we've nailed this longstanding issue. The masochists among us can now even disable and re-enable Drupal Commerce on the same site. I shaved a month off my life testing it.
  • Thanks to merlinofchaos for a conversation some months ago that sparked the idea to add a new field handler for the Commerce Price field to fix price aggregation in Views. I've added one that renders aggregated price amounts without notices using a proper currency.

And of course thanks to everyone else who contributed back to make the project better for everyone. This release includes dozens of small fixes, API additions, and features that will improve the user and developer experience for many grateful people around the world.

Check out the release notes for the full change log, a quick description of two minor API changes developers might need to accommodate, and a link to the first minor patch I've committed to the new release (congrats for the first report, noelgross!).

Ryan Szrama
Posted: Apr 10, 2013

Comments

Joel Wallis Jucá on April 11, 2013

Wow! Good to see that Drupal Commerce are evolving, and so many new contributors are submitting good quality patches for the project. Now I wonder when do Commerce Kickstart will incorporate these new features/bugfixes. Is it on the way?

drupleg on April 18, 2013

Hi, I'm a huge Drupal Commerce fan, but I've had to choose other shopping platforms after finding DC too slow, specifically with add-to-cart functions on basic small instance VPS servers. Mostly these stores are for non-profit or small business customers with just a few donation levels or a handful of products.

I find it frustrating that the Drupal Commerce software/distribution/platform is so accessible and easy to use for low budget projects, but requires higher-end hosting for even the most basic 20 product store. How can I get better performance out of DC? Are there plans in the roadmap to focus on making DC more performant out of the box on lower-end hardware?

Thank you,
--Tony

Ryan Ryan Szrama on April 20, 2013

All I can really say is there isn't enough info here to know how to respond. I run my cheese store on Site5's $5 / mo. shared hosting offering... not sure it gets any more bottom of the barrel than that. If you're talking about Commerce Kickstart 2.x, that's one thing, but I can't say I had any problem at all ensuring Drupal + Commerce ran well on my low budget host.

drupleg on April 20, 2013

My experience was with Drupal Commerce v1.3 nearly a year ago now. And more recently with Commerce Kickstart 2.x on the low budget host. There has been a lot of progress since I last looked at just core Drupal Commerce. I did checkout your cheese site and it was working very well / add-to-cart was quick, and that is also about the size of the shops that I'm looking to build too. I shall take a fresh at the latest Commerce core without the Kickstart modules to see how that performs. Thanks for the info! --Tony