We are working on SilverCart 1.3

With the announcement of SilverStripe 3 and the first preview versions, we found ourselves trapped in a deadlock. We knew that we had to modify the administration area to enable new features, but have been hesitating to do so and trying to stall for time. Since the architecture of the admin area in SilverStripe 3 is subject to heavy modification, we were afraid we will have to do it all over again once SilverStripe 3 is out.

Reality catches up

It took us a while to realize that SilverStripe 3 is still work in progress and that SilverCart has grown much more than we initially expected since the announcement of SilverStripe 3. Taking this into account, porting SilverCart to SilverStripe 3 will take longer than we expected back then when we had our first tests with the SilverStripe 3 alpha in June 2011. As you hopefully may have noticed, SilverCart has grown vastly in the last 8 months.

Additionally, we will be faced with clients using SilverStripe 2 for quite some time even after SilverStripe 3 is released. Not everybody can update right on the spot, and not everybody will. Remember PHP4?

This is why we have delayed some very important refactoring and redesigning tasks - until now.

Working on it

Some weeks ago we have started to work on SilverCart 1.3. Features that are confirmed to make it into SilverCart 1.3 are:

• improved support for multilanguage online stores
• improved and streamlined administration area
• product variations (this feature is already productive for our client Schuhfabrik Walber: walber-schuhe.de)

While there are some more features in the queue, we are not sure which ones will make it into the next release of our OpenSource eCommerce Software. Stay tuned for updates on that matter.

Timeline

We try to have the features for SilverCart 1.3 complete by the end of February 2012. Right after that, we will start the quality assurance phase. A public beta should be available in march.