osCommerce, an open source shopping cart, is one more step closer to reaching a 3.0 release. Although the journey to completing the osCommerce 3.0 software continues to take users and developers on a very long road, Alpha 4 was released to the public on March 30th. As a reminder, alpha releases of osCommerce are for "testing to help fix and improve subsequent alpha releases for a final, stable, secure, and production ready 3.0 release". In other words, you shouldn't use the software for a "live" store.
We've already talked about the new features added in earlier alpha versions of osCommerce 3.0 so there is no need to mention them in this article. New features in Alpha 4 that have been added to the shopping cart since Alpha 3 include:
- Administration Tool access levels (about time)
- Administrator Log
- Administration Tool batch action capabilities
- HTML Editor for product descriptions (long overdue in my opinion)
- Full zone entries for most countries
- Language injection feature for similar languages
- GeoIP Modules for the Administration Tool Who's Online section
In the next month of so I plan on taking a look at this latest alpha version of osCommerce 3.0 more closely. I have some hopes that there will be enough changes in the software that I won't be needing to migrate a client or two to another shopping cart package in the near future. Stay tuned to for a review in the near future...