Magento: 1.6 New Features

In case your thinking of upgrading magento to version 1.6.1 you can see what all new features you will get.
In this blog post we will see 3 major features introduced

Minimum Advertised Price
Persistent Shopping Cart
Added two-step password reset flow

Minimum Advertised Price
This feature is useful if your product manufacture has established a Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price or ‘MSRP’, and you want to sell the product at a price lower than MSRP. What this feature basically does is hide’s the product price display in your catalog and only shows this during product purchase. To setup this feature you need to first configure settings at System -> Configuration -> Sales -> Minimum Advertised Price.
Minimum Advertised Price System Configuration

Here is an explanation of the settings

Enable MAP: This is used to turn on/off the MAP feature.
Apply MAP (Default Value): If this option is selected as Yes, this means all product price will get hidden. If you select No here, then you need to individually select which product to apply the MAP on.
Display Actual Price: Here you can select at which step you want to show the customer the product price. In Cart means customer can see product price when products have been added to cart. Before Order Confirmation means product prices are shown at last step of checkout. On Gesture means product prices are shown in catalog pages but only when user clicks on link which shows price in a popup.
Default Popup Text Message: To configure the display text
Default “What’s This” Text Message: To configure the display text
Next set of configuration can be done in the product edit page. It is available in the Price tab.

Minimum Advertised Price Product Admin

Here is the explanation of the settings

Apply MAP: Here you can select Yes/No or use the default configuration.
Display Actual Price: This setting is same as the Global setting to display actual price, except you can make setting for each product here.
Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price: This is the value of the MSRP field, here you can mention the price offered by the manufacturer.

Persistent Shopping Cart
This feature basically adds a Remember Me option to the login and registration page. You can enable this feature from System -> Configuration -> Persistent Shopping Cart –> General Options.
Persistent Shopping Cart

Here is the explanation of the settings
Persistence Lifetime (seconds): Here you can set for long to remember a users login
Enable “Remember Me”: To show remember me checkout on login and registration pages
“Remember Me” Default Value: Weather remember me should be checked or unchecked by default
Clear Persistence on Log Out: To clear cookie values when user logs out
Persist Shopping Cart: Weather to remember shopping cart items of a user


Added two-step password reset flow
In this feature what magento has implemented is that, when a user click on the forgot password field with his email address, he gets a forgot password link in his email address from where he can get the new password. In older magento implementations, clicking on forgot password would directly change the password of the user, so anybody could change password of any user. But now due to the 2 step process only correct users can change their password.