A new version of the eccomerce platform, Magento, was released on these last days of March. New features and improvements included in Magento 1.3 since the release of version 1.2 include:

• Added support for customer file upload and date/time/datetime custom options
• Described all methods in WSDL for SOAP web-services to improve compatibility with .NET, Java and other languages
• Frontend Flat Catalog and improved performance. From early test and benchmarks the developers are seeing up to a 40% performance improvement when comparing to Magento 1.2.x both in page loads and memory usage.

That 40% improvement is substantial and the Magento folks are promising the release of more formal resting results soon.

References:

• Magento version 1.3.0 is available via the site's download page
• Release notes
• Magento 1.3.0 availability announcement.