What's New in OpenCart 3?

Posted by Paul on June 30, 2017

After a fairly quiet period of intense activity behind the scenes, OpenCart 3.0.0.0 was released just over a week ago. There are lots of little changes in lots of places such as a subtle but effective refresh of the admin design, improvements to the layout of admin pages and many admin items have moved to new locations and/or been improved such as the reports and statistics, but the major changes are listed below:

 

Front-End Templates / Themes

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OpenCart have changed the way template files are written. Previously, they were essentially HTML files with little bits of PHP mixed in and had a file extension of .tpl (short for template) which is a fairly common standard. Now though, templates are  written with a "templating engine" called Twig (https://twig.sensiolabs.org/) which is designed for this very purpose and is probably slightly easier to use. This is good because it's designed to be in conjunction with the built-in theme editor so that template changes can now be made from the admin area itself with a little bit of HTML and Twig know-how.

 

Language Editor

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Even if your store is only in one language, this will be useful because it allows you to edit almost all of the text and wording on the front-end of the store. Previously this could have required the time and expense of a developer, but now you can do this yourself straight from the admin area and get the wording to be more appropriate for your customers. 

 

Built-In Extension Marketplace

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Arguably the biggest and most significant change as OpenCart moves toward a hosted, cloud-based architecture is the built-in extension store. In OpenCart 3 you can now search for, buy and install extensios right from the admin area, saving time and money. Many extensions are already upgraded to work with OpenCart 3 and there will be more added daily.

 

Multi-Language SEO URLs

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Although one of our best selling extensions added Multi-Language SEO URLs to OpenCart 2.x, we're glad to see this added to the OpenCart core because it's so essential that a shopping cart platform has good SEO and with this update, OpenCart's out-of-the-box SEO just had a massive boost.

 

Have you tried OpenCart 3 yet? What did you think? Will you upgrade soon? Can we help? As always, thanks for reading and let us know in the comments!

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