Shipping Rate Provider Suite 2.5 Released

Shipping Rate Provider Suite 2.5 is now avilable for production use. The big changes from version 2.0 include:

• The number of calculators has been reduced from 6 down to 2: Order Rules and Package Rules without loosing any features. This makes it much easier to create sophisticated cost calculations without custom programming. As their names imply, use Order Rules when you want to calculate the shipping cost based on an order property (such as sub total). Use Package Rules for everything else. Of course you can still combine them for more complicated calculations.
• All of the providers now include packaging rules so that you can implement packaging based on your own business practices. The packaging is carried all the way through the checkout to order processing as Suggested Packages so your shipping department knows exactly how to package the order.
• A standalone Postal Code Support library is now included which you can use to load and manage postal code lists. The Shipping Rate Provider Suite uses this library to calculate the shipping distance between any two addresses on earth (if you load the appropriate postal code data). The Shipping Rate Provider Suite includes over 42000 US postal codes.
• InstallSuite.aspx is no longer used to finish the installation. Installation and other management tasks are now performed using the "Shipping Rate Provider Suite" plugiin (BV Admin > Plug-Ins).

Please see the updated Samples for ideas on how to implement your own cost calculations.

Migrating from Earlier Versions

Complete the following steps before you update to version 2.5:

• The shipping methods that you created with version 2.0 and earlier are not compatible with version 2.5. I recommend that you take a screen shot of each shipping method so that you can re-produce quickly using version 2.5.
• Use the InstallSuite.aspx page from your current version to Remove the current providers. If you skip this step, send me your Taskloader.Custom.vb file so that I can manually remove the code that is no longer needed.

After installing version 2.5, you can delete the unused editors by deleting the following directories:

• BVModules\Shipping\Item Router\
• BVModules\Shipping\Item Rules\
• BVModules\Shipping\Package Router\
• BVModules\Shipping\Order Router\

You can also delete BVModules\Shipping\InstallSuite.aspx.

Please see the Release Notes for details about breaking changes.

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