We are pleased to announce that SPBAS v1.5 has been released. It’s available for download now from the customer area. This release focuses almost entirely on usability in the admin area. We’ve gone through and separated the “day to day” tasks from the “set it and forget it” tasks. The end result is a new admin user interface & design that should prove very easy to use and understand. We hope you will agree and look forward to your feedback in the comments.
Before we begin…
We would like to thank our sponsors for this release. Their contributions will benefit the entire community so please take a moment to show your support.
One size does not fit all
SPBAS is unique in the fact that it was designed to have multiple storefronts that all work from a single admin installation. Each storefront offers a fully branded e-commerce engine.
Before v1.5 we presented the storefronts in our standard data grid which was designed to display hundreds of records at once. We took a different approach with v1.5 based on the fact that most of you guys don’t utilize hundreds of storefronts. Now when you go to edit a storefront you are put directly into the edit view with the option to change to another storefront from a select box.
The select box approach wouldn’t work for other sections of SPBAS like customers, orders or invoices because you have the potential for many thousands of records. For things like storefronts, you’ll only ever have a few so it makes sense to use the select box to switch between them.
Combine & Consolidate
With v1.5 we’ve taken extra effort to combine & consolidate work flow throughout SPBAS. A great example of this, before v1.5 when manually adding a new customer you had to add the customer, add the user and then add the user to the customer. This amounted to dozens of clicks and much confusion.
Now with v1.5 when you need to manually add a new customer you can do so with a single form.
So where do I find X e-mail template again?
This really falls under combine & consolidate, but it was a big support issue prior to v1.5 so we thought we would touch on it. With v1.5 we’ve put all the e-mail templates in one spot so you can quickly find the template you need. The templates are organized into groups.
For example, if you are looking for a licensing e-mail template you would look in the license group.
Customer View Changes
There were many small changes to the customer view for v1.5. The biggest change was that we’ve added a customer summary tab which gives you an overview of the customer at a glance.
In closing…
Existing customers, go get it! Upgrade as soon as you can. We’ve only listed a few of the improvements here today, the rest you’ll have to see for yourself.
Everyone else, if you’ve tried SPBAS in the past then we encourage you to try it again now.
Thank you for your continued support. We look forward to your feedback and comments.
