Changes:

• A theme setting can now hide the "Recommended for you" products on the products page.
• External reviews set to show on a product page now count towards that product's rating and review count.
• The licenses page now groups licenses into Active, Expiring, Expired and Inactive sections.
• License cards now keep the same height whatever the license offers, with extra downloads and other versions moved into dropdowns.
• Discord update notifications now have a "View Product" button.
• Discord notification embeds now have a configurable color per notification type.
• Discord notifications can now carry a message above the embed, which can ping a role or add a note such as "An update was released".
• Discord notification embeds now show the product's image and the store's name and logo, both of which can be turned off per notification type.
• Discord notification settings now have a "Send Test Message" button per notification type, which posts a sample notification into the chosen channel.
• Discord bot notifications no longer carry customer emails, account details or version file paths.
• Discord bot events are now pruned after 30 days, and notifications older than a day are not replayed after an outage.
• The Discord bot addon is now at v3.1.0. Update your bot's files to keep the bot working with the store.

Bug Fixes:

• Multi-line product option descriptions now keep their line breaks on the product page.
• Input placeholders and the price range slider handles now follow the theme colors.
• Cover images on the mobile home page carousel and the licenses page are no longer cropped.
• Discord Bot: Fixed Discord update notifications never arriving.
• Discord Bot: Sale notifications are no longer repeated when the bot cannot assign the customer role.
• Discord Bot: The "Check Sync" test event now goes out for vendors that have Discord configured.
• Discord Bot: Saving Discord settings now clears channels and roles from a previously selected server, if the server field has been changed.
• Points addon: a purchase of a deleted product no longer fails to grant points.

New Features:

Blurhash and fallback states for images

All cover images now lazily generate blurhashes, which are very small versions of the image to show during image loading. This much improves the overall aesthetics of pages loading, because the general colors of the image are shown the moment the page is first shown, and fade in smoothly to the full image when loaded.

Blurhashes do not supersede image optimization (lazy generation of extra image sizes + compression to the WebP format), which remains a core part of the store.

Admin / Creator toggle in the dashboards

A convinience toggle has been added to switch between Admin and Creator mode faster - it shows for admin users only.

Ability to invite team members to stores

You can now invite, add & manage additional users in your store. Store join invites are sent via emails, and the user must accept the inviation before joining a store.

A store member may be assigned one of 2 roles: Team Manager or Collaborator. By default, all users are collaborators - meaning they can manage the store's products, bundles, view transactions and licenses, etc.

Promoting a user to Team Manager allows them to invite others, as well as remove users from the team. The original store owner is immune to removal from their store.

Fixes & Changes:

• Aesthetic redesigns to the landing page + new product discovery sections.
• Added an FAQ section to the landing page, with its own tab in the theme editor.
• Added a fallback graphic for missing images. The alt text is no longer displayed.
• External reviews can now be displayed on the product page.
• External reviews can also now be pinned to existing store users, borrowing their name and avatar. You can still input the name manually as before.
• Added relevant links to the cards visible in the admin dashboard.
• Users may now belong to & create more than 1 store at a time. They can switch which store they're viewing from the store dropdown visible at the top of the creator dashboard's sidebar.

New Features:

Product benefits

Traditionally, the store only supported delivering versioned files. This is fine for most use cases, but it severly limited the way the store could be used.

Today we're introducing product benefits, of many types.

There are multiple types of benefits to be granted upon purchase:

• The first and primary benefit is a downloadable file. These work like files used to, together with versioning applying the same way as before. To create a file benefit, go to the product edit page, Benefits tab, and add a new benefit. Using this system, you may now also add multiple downloadable files to products, by adding more "downloadable file" benefits. An extra download button is displayed in the product's sidebar for each added downloadable file.
• Another available benefit type is: discord role grants. Grant roles for purchasing certain products. Requires the discord bot addon.
• More benefit types to come in updates.

Product options can now also have the same benefits as normal products, meaning options can grant file downloads now, among other available benefits. These files can be versioned, as normal products.

Products already existing in your store before this change are going to be migrated to the new system automatically. Benefits are resolved from the product at the time they are used, so a benefit added later is granted "backwards" too - existing holders get it without re-buying. Discord role benefits are the exception: an already-granted purchase receives the role on its next grant trigger (a renewal or reactivation), or as soon as the buyer links their Discord account.

Benefits are configured within the "Benefits" tab under the product edit page:

For options, benefits can be configured by clicking the Gift icon on each option (the option has to be saved first):

The options then display in the storefront:

Option benefit licenses are treated as separate to the main product. Therefore, they display as their own item in the licenses page, but are linked to the original product by the product's image and a tag mentioning the product name:

Media library

The admin dashboard has gained a new tab: the media library. The media library allows you to manage all the images present on disk, or in your S3 bucket (if configured).

It also allows you to manually upload imagery to your store and copy a public URL.

Conversion funnel

Added a new conversion funnel chart in the creator dashboard that displays how many impressions convert into add-to-cart clicks, and how many of those convert to sales.

New addons manifest

The addon system has been reworked to base-off the composer.json file instead of a custom manifest class.

For end-users, this means addons are now installed from the admin panel, no longer from the addons/ directory. Navigate to your admin panel, Addons, and click Install addon, then drop in the zip to install.

For addon maintainers, this means adapting the addon. Whilst the addon base class' fields have mostly been superseded by composer.json, the class still exists to provide API hooks. Addon names & descriptions are also no longer translated. Within Docker Compose stacks, the addons/ folder is now mounted to provide the ability for users to install addons from within the Docker container. For a full addon API upgrade guide, visit: https://docs.nortex.dev/docs/store/v1/addon-manifest.

Fixes & Changes:

• Restored the image quality setting (0-100), which controls the WebP compression level for generated image variants, uploads and avatars. It lives in the Image Optimization section of the Integrations tab, along with a new toggle to turn off converting uploaded images to WebP, which keeps the originals as they were uploaded.
• The header & footer designs have been cleaned up. In the footer, the Language & Currency modal has been replaced with two, simpler access, select menus. Terms of service and privacy policy links show now, if configured. Added 2 new social media link providers: Discord & GitHub.
• Made the stat cards a carousel on mobile instead of 4 stacked cards. Added dot indicators to all carousels.
• Cart rows for standalone option purchases now follow the active theme colors instead of hardcoded ones.
• Fixed mobile view for cart item rows.
• The announcement bar now uses colors configured within the theme.
• Notification rows are now striped for increased visual separability.

New Features:

Payment gateways overlays

Payment gateways (including PayPal, Stripe, and PayPal email-only) have been converted to use overlays instead of redirects. The payment is now done fully on your page, adding credibility and simplifying the usage.

Improved cookie box

The cookie box is now able to toggle specific cookies on & off. The full list of cookies is:

• Strictly necessary (includes cart data, log in session, IP for the session),

• Statistics (product views are counted in order to sort by popularity),

• (Optional, if enabled in settings) Analytics (analytics related cookies).

Two factor authentication

Users are now able to set up 2-factor authentication on their account. 2FA can be set up via codes received in email, or via an authenticator app (Google Authenticator, Authy, etc.)

Profile pictures

Users can now set a profile picture from their profile page. The picture is shown on the profile page and next to the reviews the user has written. Administrators can also set or clear a picture for any user from the admin panel.

Points addon: Ability to choose what you use points for

Historically, the points addon forced users to use points for any product they wanted to check out with - granted, of course, they could afford it with said points.

Following this release, the points addon allows the user to choose what products to use points for: they can now choose to not spend points on a product they have in their cart, or substitute only a fraction of the cost in points.

Fixes & Changes:

• Added a setting to show the vendor name on the product page as plain text instead of a link to the vendor's store page.

• Fixed email verification links being possible to guess, which could let someone else confirm and sign into an account that was not theirs.

• Fixed a Stripe or PayPal checkout being able to be finished against another customer's order.

• Orders are now only handed over once the money has actually arrived: PayPal orders are no longer delivered as soon as the buyer approves them, slower Stripe payment methods no longer deliver products before the payment clears, and the admin panel warns when an enabled gateway is saved without its webhook secret.

• Fixed exchange rates being reset to a 1:1 rate whenever the rate provider could not be fetched.

• Coupon codes now work as intended: a code that expired or lost the product it was tied to while sitting in the cart no longer discounts the order, and usage limits are enforced once the order is paid for.

• Fixed the amount charged at checkout not always matching the order it paid for.

• Fixed signing in with Discord, Google or GitHub part way through checkout dropping you on an unrelated page instead of the payment step, leaving the order unpaid.

• Social sign-in now only joins up with an existing account when the provider confirms the email address belongs to that person, is protected against being triggered from another website, and no longer lets a social account be unlinked by any page that links to it.

• Accounts created through Discord, Google or GitHub can now set a password and delete themselves; previously both settings asked for a password those accounts never had, which locked them out of both.

• The cart now refuses products that are unavailable or that you already own, ignores add-ons that do not belong to the product they were added with, and caps how many copies of one product can be added.

Notice: Update to this version manually, not using the installer. Download the newest zip, upload it, and run docker compose up -d --build. This is one-time, from now on, the installer should always be up-to-date due to the new self-updating feature.

New Features:

Temporary Renewable Licenses
Product licenses can now be set to expire, counted in days. After the configured days lapse, a renewal is required to still access the product download and its updates.
A renewal reminder is sent via email and the in-page notification system to each user who's product license is about to expire 14, 3 and 1 day before. Purchasing a license renewal adds additional time to the expiry date.
An additional grade period can be configured (in days) to allow time for the user to renew their license - this grace period can be disabled by setting the days to 0.

Search Engine
The store now utilises an indexer + a search engine (Typesense) to process search queries. Search queries are now typo-tolerant & non-linear and will show accurate results without the need for exact phrases. Indexing takes into consideration the product category, product title, tags, reviews relevance and price.

Data Export (GDPR Compliance)
User data can now be exported from the user's profile panel directly, or from the admin panel. The export includes all the stored user data, including their products, favorited products, licenses, orders, reviews, cart, notifications & the points balance.
To export from admin, the user requires the new 'users.export-data' permission flag in their role (or the wildcard '\*', which grants all permissions).
Businesses operating in the EU fall under the GDPR, which obliges them to hand over every piece of personal data they hold about a user whenever that user asks for it. This change satisfies that requirement.

Store Update Notifications
Admins are now emailed when a new platform release is detected. The check runs daily and the notice is sent once per version.
The message uses a standard mail template and is editable under Mail Templates as "Update Available".

Profile Overview Update
The user's profile overview page has been improved to include additional links as well as display the recent purchases & notifications.

.env.example Improvements
Added informative comments and section separators to the .env.example file.

BuiltByBit importer has been upgraded
The BuiltByBit importer has been upgraded to the Ultimate API V2, removing support for the API V1 version.
Together with this upgrade, the importer now imports more product fields than before, including:

• The full product description,

• The cover image and every carousel image,

• The list price, converted from the currency the resource is sold in into your store default currency.

Note: The BBB importer may work a slightly bit degraded, as we've experienced what seems like a bug with the BBB V2 API. We are working with them to hopefully resolve this issue in the near future.

Fixes & Changes:

• Custom user themes have been moved out of the resources/ directory and into a separate themes/ directory. Editing the default theme when in a Docker context now also requires a full image rebuild, since resources/ is no longer mounted from the host's disk. [!] If you had a custom theme in resources/themes/, move it to themes/ to keep it available. If you're missing the themes/ folder, create it yourself.

• Updated the default dark theme. If your theme values differ from the defaults, you can reset them to see it.

• The mail template editor in the admin panel now has a live preview pane that renders the template with sample data as you type, with a desktop and mobile width toggle.

• Uploads are now organised under a single uploads/ directory on the storage disk (uploads/covers, uploads/gallery, uploads/vendors, uploads/branding, uploads/knowledgebase, uploads/theme, uploads/descriptions).

• Files uploaded before that reorganisation are moved into place by php artisan app:migrate-storage-layout, which Docker runs for you on startup. It relocates everything in one pass, deletes each legacy directory once the last file has left it, and is safe to run again. Directories still holding files that nothing references are kept, and rows pointing at a file that is no longer on the disk are left untouched and reported in the log.

• Image optimization now exclusively generates WebP formats (which is supported in pretty much all browsers nowadays), no more JPEG. This saves on disk usage and, when generating, CPU cycles.

• Dropped the image quality setting as it is now redundant due to the removal of JPEG file variants.

• Moved the Image Optimization section to "Integrations" from "General".

• Fixed an occurance where the invalid amount would be shown on product options.

• Reorganized the account settings into rows and added descriptions for each.

• The "Browse" item in the desktop navigation bar is now a link to "All products". The mobile navigation is unchanged.

• The subcategory cards on category pages have been removed. Category multi-select and aggregate results made them redundant, as subcategories are already reachable from the filter sidebar.

• The lang/ directory is no longer mounted in the Docker Compose file. If you the lang/ directory contents yourself, make sure to rebuild the image.