alpha

osCommerce announced that their osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 Alpha 5 will be made available on March 11th.  They've also retooled the schedule for additional releases of this well known shopping cart.

osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 Alpha 5 was scheduled for release by the end of February and has been postponed to ensure the quality of the release. It will now be released on Wednesday the 11th of March. This release also brings in a new roadmap and release strategy for the v3.x series.

Our focus has changed with this release from implementing additional features into the core to concentrating on the framework and to add the features to future releases. This allows v3.0 to be released sooner with a stable framework, and allows a much faster release cycle for new features compared to the previous “release every 6 months” release strategy.

New features that can be expected in the new release of osCommerce since Alpha 4 was made available include:

• Product Attributes Implementation
• Dynamic Table Listings (Administration Tool)
• Live Search (Administration Tool)
• Administration Tool sections now self-contained Applications
• Error Logging; both PHP and MySQL errors and warnings now logged (forced runtime usage of PHP E_ALL and MySQL STRICT_ALL_TABLES)
• Stabilized Framework
• Usage of JSON for RPC calls
• Inclusion of jQuery v1.3.2 and jQuery UI v1.6rc6

Additional information about the version 3.0 of the ecommerce platform can found at the osCommerce blog.

If the Firefox browser were a car, it would be in the garage right now being souped up by an anxious group of gearheads.

When Firefox 3.0 is released later this year, the open-source browser is likely to contain a host of new features, including offline support for Web applications and new bookmark and search features. Mozilla released the second alpha version of Firefox 3.0 earlier this month.

The folks at Gallery, an online photo album organizer, are working hard developing the newest version of Gallery in the 1.x line...Gallery 1.6. Gallery 1.6 is currently at Alpha 2 which means that the software is intended for testing purposes and not for use on production servers. If your confused with what I just said then I recommend you wait installing Gallery 1.6 until it has been fully released.

The two primary goals for this new version of Gallery were HTML 4.01 compliance and easier visual customization. Because so many of the code changes were centered around the visualization, it is unlikely that your previous 1.x themes and styles for Gallery are fully compatible with Gallery 1.6. For a highlight of changes and new features as well as download links in Gallery, check out the official announcement located on the application's home site.

The current development schedule calls for Gallery 1.6 to be released at the end of November, 2006. In in the Spring of 2007, Gallery 1.7 will be released and it will likely be the last actively developed version in the Gallery 1.x series to be released. After Gallery 1.7 is released the developers are expected to support it for one year which gives procrastinators the time the need to finally adopt Gallery 2.