Quote: new features and enhancements in CRE Loaded 6.3 include the following (some features are limited to the Professional Edition – visit GetCRE.com/CRELoaded for more information):

Content Director

Content Director adds a powerful content management system to CRE Loaded 6.3, enabling store owners to dramatically improve the look and feel of their ecommerce storefront and content pages, and allowing store owners to add and manage rich content. The advanced page-management features in Content Director make it possible for users to build an entire Web store in one tool, with easy menus and full-search capabilities. Content Director also helps store owners to improve page rankings with integrated search engine optimization features.

SEO URL 4.1

The SEO URL feature of CRE Loaded 6.3 optimizes your URLs for improved indexing by all major search engines. SEO URL automatically places important keywords – derived from your category, product database and other content – directly into your URLs. Management of keywords at the URL level is a significant factor affecting the optimization and ranking of your pages within search engines.

One-Page Checkout

One-Page Checkout is one of the most-requested features from existing customers to be addressed in version 6.3. One-Page Checkout combines all checkout elements into a single-page, giving your customers added simplicity and ease-of-use – a factor also shown to significantly reduce shopping cart abandonment rates.

Abandoned Cart Recovery

The CRE Loaded Recover Abandoned Carts Module finds abandoned CRE Loaded shopping carts and creates a list of items and the customers who were shopping for them. You can generate automatic emails to abandons, asking them for feedback about why they didn’t complete the process, or offering them an incentive to complete the purchase and reminding them of the item(s) they didn’t purchase. Abandoned Cart Recovery includes a reporting feature to report on data, such as number of abandoned carts converted into sales.

RCI Expandion

Runtime Code Inclusion (RCI) allows custom modifications and additions to be used with the base program code, with less likelihood of the customizations being overwritten by future patches/updates to the CRE Loaded core code. In version 6.3 the RCI functionality is expanded further than ever before.... 

Quote:osCommerce 3.0 Alpha 3 "Spekulatius" Available for download


osCommerce releases osCommerce 3.0 Alpha to the public:

We are proud to announce the third alpha release in the osCommerce 3.0 development cycle and it is now available for general public testing. osCommerce 3.0 Alpha 3 "Spekulatius" is the first release to be made available to the public, where the first two alpha releases were made available to Community Sponsors only.

Alpha releases are made to showcase the new features being worked on and to generalize a version specific for testing to help fix and improve subsequent alpha releases for a final, stable, secure, and production ready 3.0 release.

Although we strive to keep alpha releases stable, the primary intentions of making alpha releases publicly available are for testing purposes only. The framework for 3.0 is still under development and will change in subsequent alpha releases. No upgrade paths will be provided between alpha releases and are therefore not recommended for production use.

Some of the new features that are made available in this release include:

    * New object-oriented framework (alpha 1)
    * New installation routine (alpha 1)
    * register_globals and magic_quotes_gpc compatibility (alpha 1)
    * New template structure implementation (alpha 1)
    * Search-engine optimizations (alpha 1)
    * Service modules (alpha 1)
    * Checkout procedure cleanup (alpha 2)
    * New language definitions implementation (alpha 2)
    * Updated payment modules with post-transaction actions (alpha 3)
    * Catalog front-end, administration tool, and installation routine combined (alpha 3)
    * XHTML/CSS based default template layout for the catalog side (alpha 3)
    * Multiple product images implementation (alpha 3)
    * New action modules (alpha 3)
    * ... and more! (application_top.php has never been so clean!)


The full osCommerce 3.0 roadmap can be seen here:

http://svn.oscommerce.com/trac/roadmap?show=all

We'd like to specially thank the following community members for extensively helping out in testing this release:

Anders Pamdal (Tech2000)
Alan Rogers (AlanR)
Ryan (rkoechel2004)
Frank Heinen (F.R.@.N.K)

The osCommerce 3.0 Alpha 3 "Spekulatius" release can be downloaded here:

http://www.oscommerce.com/redirect.php/go,36 (hosted at Sunsite.dk)