It's no secret that the V1.3.0 release is behind schedule vs what we'd announced months ago, and although at various times we have tried to give a flavor of what is going on with the development progress, we have not done a good job of keeping you apprised of the progress.

There are various reasons behind this, and despite what may look like a lack of progress, a huge effort has been put into v1.3.0. The final result of all of our work is code that is cleaner, quicker, better documented, more object-oriented, more extensible, and compliant.

However, with all of that work done, the team got together and looked at the code we had to release. While we are extremely proud of it, we saw straight away that it would present a serious problem for people wanting to upgrade from v1.2.6 (or previous versions).

The code we have in our development library, touches virtually every single file, not only that, but it rearranges the code structure as well. When we sat down and talked about this we realized it would be a huge disservice to the community to release it in this form. For the PHP experts out there it might not provide too much of a problem, but for the majority of our users, who want to spend their time looking after their sites, and not delving into diff's and PHP, it certainly would have been a nightmare.

We have therefore decided to alter the release schedule of v1.3, in a way that will allow users to more easily upgrade their sites, over a number of 'bridging' releases.

The start of this will be the forthcoming restructured v1.3 release.

This will now consist of essentially just the following core alterations.

Added : New application_top.php structure
Added : New base and notifier class system
Altered : New base templates -- which have been cleaned and made XHTML 1.0 transistional compliant

Other things we have posted discussion about (such as productPricing classes, tax enhancements, etc) will be implemented as part of the subsequent staged releases.

To go back over the above items: The new application_top.php initSystem, allows third party coders to add includes for new functions, classes and scriptlets at any point in the running order of application_top,php that they want. Not only that but it also allows easy methods to override the built in application_top.php and the scriptlets it loads. This was discussed on the forum at http://www.zen-cart.com/modules/ipb/index....pic=19009&st=40

The notifier class, is pretty unique (in an ecommerce app), and provides a way for 3rd party coder to hook into core code, without touching core code. More info about this on the forum in the same post mentioned above.

The work done on the templates achieves a number of objectives. First it makes our base templates XHTML 1.0 transistional compliant, secondly it removes 99% of all business logic and further modularizes the templates. If on your site is based on one of the stock templates, then the upgrade should be quite painless. For those who have made more extensive changes, upgrading will be harder, but as the template changes are restricted, we hope that you should manage (using a good diff program, like beyond compare or winmerge) to be able to find enough reference points to ease the transition.

As well as this over the lifetime of the bridging releases, we will be making sure there is adequate documentation, to show where files/file structures have changed, providing old function -> new class method maps, and more.

And now the even better news. In order to mitigate what will now be an extended release schedule for V1.3.0 it has been decided to now add some extra functionality. So for the initial v1.3.0 release we are pleased to say that we will be adding the following functionality:

- Unlimited EZ-Pages (inspired by Sunrom's Unlimited Information Pages contribution)
- CSS Stylesheet control on a per-page basis (inspired by Juxi Zoza's contribution)
- PHPmailer to improve emailing infrastructure
- Site Map and 404-trapper (inspired by networkdad's contribution)
- Attributes system enhancements -- added textarea support, easier cascading deletes, and more
- Small navigation improvements for multiple-categories-links-manager
- metatags custom separators now more easily customizable
- Numerous consumer usability issues have been addressed - primarily in the checkout area


What will happen after v1.3.0 is released? After v1.3.0 there will be several more interim releases that will take us to v2.0. Each of these releases will progressively implement code that we have already written, as well as adding more new functionality.

The way we have structured the changes in each release, upgrading code will get easier with each release. Each release will move us towards a much more class based codebase, as well as adding features and optimizations, to make Zen Cart the most scalable, upgradeable and customizable (and also the most secure) ecommerce application available (whether free or paid for).

As well as this, we are almost ready to move to the new Support Site. The new Support site (apart from support forums) is built wholly using the Zen Cart engine along with some contributions and new product types to handle extra functionality such as FAQ's, News Items, and Downloads.

Furthermore, another big reason for this post is to announce, that 'Acts of God' permitting, the first bridging release (v1.3.0) should be ready for public consumption in the next few weeks.