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.

This release is a stable production-ready release and will be the first supported release in the v3.x series. This release is still marked as an Alpha release due to framework changes that are still planned. We therefore recommend the installation of this release to those that are performing it themselves, and for hosting and service providers to wait until the final release of v3.0 before making it available to their customers.

The roadmap for v3.0 is now:

v3.0 Alpha 5

• 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

v3.0 Beta 1

• HTML E-Mails
• Purchase Without Account
• Frozen Framework
• Updated Frontend/GUI
• Upgrade from v2.2 and v3.0 Alpha 5

v3.0

• Bugfixes
• Finalize Updated Frontend/GUI
• Documentation
• Certified Modules
• Upgrade from v2.2 and v3.0 Beta 1

v3.1

• Backup/Import/Export Features

v3.2

• Gift Vouchers and Coupons

Read more at the osCommerce blog