Important:

This is a security release! It ships proper fixes from the PHP Group for the PHP CVEs addressed temporarily in v27.0.1 (by bumping to PHP v8.5.12). Please upgrade to it immediately.

Stripe Managed Payments

Stripe's Merchant of Record service, Stripe Managed Payments (formerly lemon squeezy) has been added as a payment method option.

As a merchant of record, Stripe handles the following for you:

• VAT/GST taxation and filing,
• fraud management,
• refunds,
• dispute reconciliation.

When using Stripe Managed Payments, Stripe is the entity selling the product, not you. This means bank statements show Stripe as the company the client paid to, and Stripe just pays out your cut. Before setting this up, you need to make your Stripe account eligible. Stripe Managed Payments costs an add-on 3.5% fee (accurate as of Oct 19).

Stripe Managed Payments does not support payouts. For that, you will have to configure regular Stripe.

Payment Gateways

• Stripe (regular) no longer has the "Sandbox Mode" toggle as part of its settings. Whether or not to use sandbox is detected automatically by the publishable key type (pk_test_... or pk_live_...).
• All payment settings are now shown, regardless of whether or not a gateway is enabled or not, mostly for convinience sake.
• Stripe and PayPal checkouts now list every cart item on its own line, instead of a single line for the whole order.
• Stripe can show a PayPal badge among its payment methods. It is hidden by default; show it under "Payment method badges" on the Payment Methods page if your Stripe account accepts PayPal.
• PayPal and PayPal Webscr can no longer be enabled at the same time.

Cart & Checkout

• When tax is added at checkout (Stripe Managed Payments), the cart now shows the subtotal with a "VAT/GST calculated at checkout" note.
• New theme setting, "Hide Gateway Name on Pay Button" (on by default): with a single gateway enabled, the checkout button reads just "Pay".

Categories

• Category names & descriptions can be translated into every store language.
• Category descriptions have been improved with a rich-text editor, and now support multi-line texts. They have also been made optional.
• The admin category tree has been restyled to match the other tables.
• The category description is shown above the product listing when browsing a single category.

Localization

• Bundle names and descriptions, custom page titles, sale campaign banners and payment gateway display names can be translated into every store language.

Admin Panel

• New "Light Store News" dashboard widget with announcements from the Light Store team.

Docker

• The store now uses Nginx / PHP-FPM to run the store (instead of the former FrankenPHP with implicit Caddy) and is pinned to the exact PHP version: 8.5.12 which contains the latest PHP CVE patches.
• Added a new "starting up" page that displays when the Docker containers are up, but the store is still running migrations or waiting for the database / Redis.

Technical Refactoring

• Bumped many Composer dependencies to their latest version.
• Removed unused dependencies and assets: Scramble, the media library package and leftover code editor assets.