Hi all!

After nearly a year of development we have finished Pavilion 2.0. It began like a relatively small update, aimed to add a few features. As we gathered more and more feature requests we decided to rebuild the whole system, turning it into a theme framework. In fact it’s technically not right to name it Pavilion 2.0 because it is the Pavilion theme on top of our newly created OpenCart platform called BurnEngine.

We plan to release our next themes based on this new platform. This will have several benefits for you. The most important one is the shared codebase between all of the themes. This way any compatible extension will work with an arbitrary BurnEngine theme without modifications. No more questions like ‘will xxx extension work with your next theme’.

Another benefit is that every bugfix and OpenCart compatibility update will apply to all BurnEngine themes by default. As soon as we fix a bug for one theme, all other themes will get the fix immediately. No more troubles whether your theme will get the latest patches.

Along with the bug fixes, the unified code base will allow us to add features to all of the themes simultaneously, just by upgrading the underlying BurnEngine. You won’t be forced to buy new themes in order to get improved functionality.

Together with the above mentioned advantages, you will get a bunch of new features when upgrading to BurnEngine/Pavilion2. We will list the most significant ones only, as under-the-hood improvements are countless.

User features:

- Improved layout system
- Menu manager – create menu instances and use them all over your content.
- Drag & Drop header builder – no more limits with pre-built headers. Just create custom ones by using the familiar block builder.
- Drag & drop product layout builder – no more restrictions of how your product page layout will look. You can now reorder its elements according to your taste.
- Import/Export of theme options – easily transfer your current theme modifications to another store.
- Change themes and skins from the admin panel – you can make custom skins and save them.
- OpenCart performance extension – we analyzed some of the OpenCart’s weak points and created patches in order to improve them. According to our test, with this extension enabled, your shop will be faster than default OpenCart installation
- SEO pack extension – we decided to incorporate the missing OpenCart SEO functionality right into BurnEngine. It’s not a put-up job to present some trivial SEO features. It’s a worthy rival of the existing premium SEO extensions. Among its features are multilingual keyword, languages prefixes, google microdata, facebook opengraph, twitter card, keyword editor and generator etc.

Technical features:

- OpenCart 2.1.0.1 compatibility
- Twitter Bootstrap 3.3 – the templates use the bootstrap markup and styles, so any bootstrap module should look nice with our themes
- Overhauled responsive functionality – hundreds of bug fixes and improvements on mobile devices

BETA period

We expect no more than 10 days of beta testing before issuing an official release.

Documentation

We haven’t updated our documentation to cover the new features yet. You could explore them manually for now.

Installation & Upgrade

It is recommended to make a new OpenCart installation for this purpose, but you are also able to upgrade your existing shop to Pavilion 2.

Here are the steps:
- upload the package contents to the root folder of your store
- enter the admin panel and install the BurnEngine module
- change template to BurnEngine from System > Settings > Store
- [upgrade only] you will be prompted to upgrade your store – choose your design and wait until the process is finished

Please, have in mind that upgrade cannot fully transfer all your theme settings from Pavilion to BurnEngine. You may need to additionally fine tune some of your styles.

Be sure you have a recent backup, before you go through the upgrade process.

How to apply for the beta test

- leave a message here in this topic that you want to participate
- send us an email

with this text as a message: “With the current email, I confirm my participation in the Pavilion 2 BETA. I agree, that the source code that will be given on my disposal is for testing purposes only and I will not distribute, share, or sell it.”

BR,
ThemeBurn team