With Community Store recently reaching version 1.0, here's a video I made demoing the add-on and discussing some of the more interesting features that have been added.

Over the course of last year we put a lot of time and energy into helping develop an open and free ecommerce add-on for concrete5, Community Store.

The add-on is an online shop/cart for concrete5 version 5.7 and version 8, designed to be easy to manage but highly customisable. If you've ever used eCommerce for concrete5 version 5.6 or below, you'll find that the feature set is quite comparable.

A shopping cart system for the web isn't exactly revolutionary, but where this system shines is in how it is tightly integrated with concrete5. You can use the store to create new user accounts on purchase, unlocking protected areas. You can freely and creatively place product and product list blocks across your site, controlling their visibility with permissions. You can create new page types to act as categories, setting up your site structure how you need. Need to add a message to your checkout screen? Drop in a block. From a development point of view, you can override page layouts and block templates easily and safely. You get to use one of the web's most flexible and powerful content management systems to customise your online shop platform. 

Last month the decision was made to increment the version number of community store to version 1.0, effectively announcing it featured and stable enough for usage on production sites.

We're very excited as to how far community store has progressed and what it is now capable of. Alongside the core store add-on, the number of related add-ons continue to grow as well, including payment gateways for Stripe, Paypal, Pin Payments and Authorize.net. There are too many features to list, but check out the video for some of the most interesting ones that have been recently added.

If you'd like to try out the add-on, please head on over to the Community Store organisation on github and download a release or the master branch (which should be stable, just make sure you take off the -master from the folder name before installing). Contributions large and small are all welcome, even if it's just your involvement in discussions.

Alternatively, if you are looking to use concrete5 as an ecommerce platform and would like assistance with installing and customising community store, feel free to make contact - we'd love to work with you.