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.