What is going on and why are we doing this? 

Our second post starts with a big thank you to everyone reading this article and especially to the members of the community forum, our e-mail subscribers and ticket system users who contacted us. We had a really, really busy September. We won’t really bore you to death with any details though.

Let’s have a quick motivation exercise. Guys and girls, never give up. Finish your ideas and unleash them – the internet public will eventually value your efforts and respond to them in time. It’s what we’ve realized and experienced in the recent months and we know we are not the only ones feeling this way.

An example can be this single user from our forums who said the following:

Kristo 2013-09-14 00:18:03

Just needed to mention that I'm completely speechless. You just put all of them CMS Systems to shame. I hope you guys have all the success you wish for! Cheers

Wow, thanks a ton! Three sentences just put meaning into our 2 years of hard work and empowered our motivation! Such words could be said to each and every one of you if you give your best and believe in yourself and your projects.

Aside from such flattering words as Kristo’s we received a lot of feedback on what Microweber lacks. This is great because we get reminded that our work is not nearly done and have a lot of stuff to do!

Let’s be more specific here: we’re sharing with you the things that an online business needs the most in its online shop interface. A big thanks to http://salesedge.microweber.com.

Without further ado, here are some requests and comments:

Posted on Friday 20th September at 12:48 in members.microweber.com support system as ticket request

1. Coupon Discounts

Create a campaign for the holidays or maybe give away a coupon code to your most loyal customers? This is a perfect way to advertise your store.

2. Recover Abandoned Carts

Remind your customers of their orders by sending a customizable e-mail to them. This works wonders for many businesses.

3. Social Reviews and a Point Based System

Customers often want to leave feedback after making their orders. With Microweber they can choose between a video feedback or a written one. Leaving feedback accumulates points for them, as does purchasing items or sharing products from your site. This will give them a way to get involved with your store and have fun!

4. Live Chat

A function that is terribly important for people looking to chat with their customers in case they would like to make an order or simply ask questions.

5. Email Newsletter List

You can market to all the members who signed up to your websites newsletter. Get updates that shop owners like myself can customize. Pre templates for making great call to action emails and a system base of all of our customers’ information so we can choose to send emails based on gender, or styles they are interested in.

6. Wish List

I think this is useful as we can give coupon discounts on the products that customers add to their wish lists. So they can add products to the wish list of theirs and we can then market to them savings on the items they have added to their wish list.

7. Back In Stock

Don't risk lost sales on sold out items. Back in Stock allows your customers to register for an instant email alert when an out of stock item is available to purchase.

8. Social Sharing

If you could add a list more of places we can share to that would be great such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Stumbleupon, Email, Blogger, Wordpress, Linkedin, and other popular places.

9. Affiliate Program

This is perfect for those who would like to gain money or discounts for referring members to our website. 

10. Shopping Group Competitions

This is where a customer can create a clan or group name and invite members to that group. They can send messages to one another and shop together. Whichever group makes the most sales or recognition will gain prizes from us. They can customize their group page and share their group page with friends.

11. Raffle items

We can create a page dedicated to some products we are willing to offer up for free when we reach our thousand or 10 thousand share from our customers.

12. CSV/Txt Import

This is perfect for people like me who have thousands of items to upload. So if we can upload all of our items with a CSV and Text file that would be great. 

13. SKU and Product List Page

It would be nice if you can add a SKU option so we can place items with SKU numbers and we could pull them up in the back office by SKU. So that way it would be easy for us to remove items that are out of stock. This is very much needed. These are not mandatory at the moment but would be great features that are needed and would definitely put Microweber on top of the web making food chain. These are suggestions that are very popular.

Thank you!

Thank you too, http://salesedge.microweber.com, thank you for your time and feedback! Your recommendations are excellent and we completely agree that such things are needed for every online business out there. We will try our best to implement them beautifully!

What to expect of the next update

Quick post

We thought about it and decided that there is a huge need to improve the content creation process. So we added a Quick Post to the Dashboard and inserted in the Toolbar too.

Here is the result:

Improved live edit

Improved "Live edit" design and functionality. We are making the live edit a lot lighter and easier to use.

We improved the “Live edit” design and functionality. What we’re aiming at is lightness and an unbelievably easy way to use it.

Here is how it will look like:

Template settings from the live edit

Template settings is a tool to help you with defining the overall style of your website. Customize your website font, choose a color for your background or links and many, many more.

You can click the Design button in the Live edit and voila, the artist in you is unleashed.

New Templates

A few users requested moving the default template to Bootstrap 3 so we will do this. We also included some new templates with an online shop included – all of them have excellent designs, of course!

Online shop

We buffed the Online shop a bit. Most notably we added Weight and quantity based shipping prices, Quantity calculation, SKU number for the products and a function to View and recover abandoned shopping carts. Here is a screenshot so you can take a look at the progress:

New homepage is coming

A home page with a 10 seconds video with the main Drag & Drop features will replace the current one. Be sure to follow it and click the magic “Sign up” button!

Many more features are to come and many more remaining to be discovered by you. As always, we are completely opened to your suggestions at info(@)microweber.com or at this link: https://microweber.uservoice.com/forums/223918-general

By your request we also included a road-map at https://microweber.com:443/roadmap

We give and will continue giving our best to provide everything you need so you can create a beautiful website or online shop.

We would like to address the web design companies: guys, Microweber is exactly the Open source project you need. We made it just so you can use it to its fullest! Same applies to the freelance developers who can easily use our CMS for their products.

Come to think of it – is there really a reason not to use Microweber? Just take a go at it and tell us how you feel afterwards!

You can fire up the Microweber Beta version from here.

It was a great September, really. We know what’s next on the agenda and can’t wait to share with you some new stuff. Be patient, though!

Our last words are a huge thanks to:

http://www.intrudex.net/ for the testing our security: http://www.intrudex.net/blog/13294:microweber-stored-xss-injection-fixed.html

and https://www.htbridge.com for the security testing and sharing this information at: https://www.htbridge.com/advisory/HTB23175

Much appreciated, guys!

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