Release Candidate 4 and shopping carts
Today Textpattern reached RC4. I have been keeping a close eye on the timeline and the number of updates in the last few days has been astonishing. Only available through svn, there are a number of new and very worthwhile features compared to the downloadable release.
Update RC4 is now the regular download version, not just SVN.
With the pace of development going so fast, I can’t help wonder how far away from 1.0 the development team are. Nothing has been publicly stated yet and, unlike many, I am not worried. they should take as long as is needed. Since I first downloaded and started using the first gamma version, Textpattern has grown from a quirky but promising experiment in to a World class CMS with many more possibilities than most users imagine.
I am looking forward to 1.0 even though it is going to cause me some considerable work. We have just gone live with a TXP powered shop for a friend of ours and with the final release of 1.0 I’ll have to go in and hack the new version prior to updating the site. I’ll not post a link until the design is complete but the inner workings are 99% done and it seemed a shame to keep our friend from possible online income. You’ll read about it here first!
Why did I go with TXP for a commerce site? Before taking this direction, I installed and setup just about every free and open source shopping cart you could mention. every damn one of them was a pain in the arse to get running and don’t even talk to me about modifying templates. Good grief! More to the point, from the standpoint of the final user, they were way to complex and difficult to run. In the end I gave up the search and a TXP/Paypal solution has worked a treat. Some hacking of the code here and there and a few plugins have been used to create a shopping cart/website that is as easy to update as sending an email.
May I say a huge thanks to Dean and the crew for creating this jewel of a script.