Smartstore 5 based on ASP.NET Core 6 was released

[Michael-Herzog]

We're proud to announce we have released Smartstore 5. Smartstore 5 is a port of Smartstore 4 to the new ASP.NET Core 6 platform.

Highlights

• Smartstore 5 is now cross-platform and supports Linux and macOS alongside Microsoft Windows. This means that Smartstore can be run on almost any hosting server, whether dedicated, cloud or shared.
• In addition to Microsoft SQL Server, Smartstore now supports MySQL. PostgreSQL is in planning and will follow soon.
• Smartstore 5 is one of the fastest out-of-the-box e-commerce solutions in the world! A small store with less than 1,000 items and a few dozen categories can achieve an average Time to First Byte (TTFB) of far below 100 milliseconds... even without output cache or other performance measures.
  • Compared to Smartstore 4, 10x faster in some areas
  • Significantly less memory consumption (approx. 50%)
  • Even low-cost (cloud) hosting delivers high performance
• Powerful DataGrid in the backend
  • Developed in-house, no more 3rd party libaries with annoying license restrictions
  • Intuitive, feature-rich and flexible
  • Supports row selection, multi-column sorting, column reordering, column toggling, paging etc.
  • Grid state is persisted in browser's local storage and restored on page refresh
  • Search filter expressions: run complex search queries, e.g. (*jacket or *shirt) and !leather*
  • (DEV) datagrid TagHelper which lets you control every aspect of the grid
• Frontend & backend facelifting
• Create, manage and restore database backups in the backend
• More external authentication providers: Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn coming soon
• Advanced settings for image processing: compression, quality, response caching etc.

Breaking or Significant Changes

• Blog, News, Forum and Polls are now external commercial plugins
• No support for Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition (SQLCE) anymore
• Payment providers need to be reconfigured (API Key etc.)

Project Status

• Except for the WebApi plugin, the open source Community Edition has been fully ported (WebApi will follow soon)
• Already ported commercial plugins:
  • Azure
  • BMEcat
  • Common Export Providers
  • Content Slider
  • ETracker
  • GDPR
  • Guenstiger
  • Media Manager
  • Mega Menu
  • Mega Search
  • Mega Search Plus
  • OpenTrans
  • Order Number Formatter
  • Output Cache
  • PageBuilder
  • PdfExport
  • PostFinance
  • Redis
  • SearchLog
  • Skrill
  • Sofortueberweisung
  • TinyImage
  • TrustedShops
  • UrlRewriter
  • Other commercial plugins developed by Smartstore will follow soon
• Obsolete plugins that will not be ported:
  • AccardaKar
  • BizImporter
  • EasyCredit
  • NewsImporter
  • LeGuide Shopwahl

Development

• No proprietary Unit of Work & Repository Pattern anymore: gave up IDbContext and IRepository<T> in favor of DbContext and DbSet<T>
• Less and more lightweight service classes by removing all generic CRUD stuff
• Much easier plugin development
• Async function calls all the way through
• Database schema did not change and therefore remains backward compatible. Still we STRONGLY recommend to create a backup before upgrading
• Extremely powerful widget system
• Large TagHelper library with 50+ custom helpers
• On-demand deployment of native libraries via NuGet
• Custom entities in plugin projects can now define navigation properties to entities in the application core