osCommerce 3.0 Alpha 3 "Spekulatius" Released

[michael_s]

We are proud to announce the third alpha release in the osCommerce 3.0 development cycle and it is now available for general public testing. osCommerce 3.0 Alpha 3 "Spekulatius" is the first release to be made available to the public, where the first two alpha releases were made available to Community Sponsors only.

Alpha releases are made to showcase the new features being worked on and to generalize a version specific for testing to help fix and improve subsequent alpha releases for a final, stable, secure, and production ready 3.0 release.

Although we strive to keep alpha releases stable, the primary intentions of making alpha releases publicly available are for testing purposes only. The framework for 3.0 is still under development and will change in subsequent alpha releases. No upgrade paths will be provided between alpha releases and are therefore not recommended for production use.

Some of the new features that are made available in this release include:

• New object-oriented framework (alpha 1)
• New installation routine (alpha 1)
• register_globals and magic_quotes_gpc compatibility (alpha 1)
• New template structure implementation (alpha 1)
• Search-engine optimizations (alpha 1)
• Service modules (alpha 1)
• Checkout procedure cleanup (alpha 2)
• New language definitions implementation (alpha 2)
• Updated payment modules with post-transaction actions (alpha 3)
• Catalog front-end, administration tool, and installation routine combined (alpha 3)
• XHTML/CSS based default template layout for the catalog side (alpha 3)
• Multiple product images implementation (alpha 3)
• New action modules (alpha 3)
• ... and more! (application_top.php has never been so clean!)

The full osCommerce 3.0 roadmap can be seen here:

http://svn.oscommerce.com/trac/roadmap?show=all

We'd like to specially thank the following community members for extensively helping out in testing this release:

Anders Pamdal (Tech2000)
Alan Rogers (AlanR)
Ryan (rkoechel2004)
Frank Heinen (F.R.@.N.K)

The osCommerce 3.0 Alpha 3 "Spekulatius" release can be downloaded here:

http://www.oscommerce.com/redirect.php/go,36 (hosted at Sunsite.dk)

We welcome all public interest in testing development alpha releases to help further improve the 3.0 release. All development activity can be seen at the osCommerce Development Site here:

http://svn.oscommerce.com/trac

If you experience problems with this release, please create a new ticket at the Development Site with the relevant information. Discussions regarding the development of osCommerce are held in the osCommerce Development channels on the Community Support forums:

http://forums.oscommerce.com/index.php?showforum=43

We wish you the best of fun with testing this release, and look forward to your feedback!

This announcement can be discussed on the community support forums at:

http://forums.oscommerce.com/index.php?showtopic=225889

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