Wow, it seems like it was ages ago since we’ve launched Ohanah v3. So much happened in the meantime! We had three releases during first 15 days after the launch, that fixed the most obvious bugs. Then, people started digging deeper. As it happens with any software in the early stage - they found errors that couldn’t be found by generik tests. We were super busy fixing all of them, and we kind of neglected our responsibility to communicate. We will not make that mistake again.

There are numerous small fixes here and there, but the major improvements are:

Router

The router, in the early releases, was broken in several ways. The most obvious error was that it wasn’t even installed. After fixing that silly mistake, more serious errors popped out. Long story short - we found and fixed them all. Now all the views in Ohanah have beautiful, search engine friendly URLs. This excludes the pages that don’t need SEO optimization because they are not public - order, ticket and a receipt. However, even in those pages Ohanah triggers a proper menu item, so the modules are at the right places.

Events links in calendars also received some love, and they are behaving properly now.

Emails

A few of early adopters of Ohanah tried to customize emails (guide about that coming soon) and failed. This was due to the fact that our email system contained some design flaws that weren’t obvious during the testing phase. We did the right thing and refactored the whole email system. Now we have a very powerful templating engine and a proper override system, so everybody can tailor emails to their needs.

The work on the emails isn’t done yet; we plan to upgrade the system very soon, to bring some new features and make it more user-friendly.

Translations

Ohanah is now fully translated into two languages: Norwegian Bokmål and Danish. Thanks Kenneth and Anders for your great work! While translators were working hard to bring new languages in Ohanah, we worked to make their job easier. We refactored how Ohanah handles dates to a much simpler system, making translations much easier. Also, US dates are now available as the English US language is available. Our decision to put everything related to date and currency into the languages was proved right many times.

Apart from these three major fields of improvements, there were a lot of small fixes, features, and improvements. You can read the whole list at changelog.

What’s next?

In parallel with fixing bugs and small improvements, we started working on the next major version of Ohanah. Besides the migrator, the main focus is a payment system. Right now, PayPal is hardcoded in Ohanah and we’re working to separate the payments from the core. This will allow us to add new payment systems easily (at first PayPal Pro, PayPal Express Checkout and then Stripe, Authorize.net and a few others). Of course, we will provide instructions on how to make custom payment plugins. With the separation of the payment system, we will introduce one more feature that was in the top three requested features for Ohanah v2. Lets leave it as a surprise for January 2016, when we expect this to be ready for public testing.