In the wee hours of last night (a.k.a. this morning), I rolled the Drupal Commerce 1.1 release and a coordinated release of Commerce Kickstart, the installation profile that makes it easy to get up and running with Drupal Commerce.
It was just over three months ago that we released Drupal Commerce 1.0, and since then it's been put to use on thousands of new websites sized from the mom-and-pop shop to the major international brand. This new release features an additional 95 commits credited to 30 contributors from around the world who helped improve the core Commerce modules based on their experiences building a wide variety of Drupal Commerce sites.
The release notes provide a full accounting of the details, including a changelog of commits since the 1.0 release.
High points of the new release include:
- Updates to the checkout form to improve the validation, submission, and error handling processes.
- Bug fixes and API improvements in the Tax system resolving issues pertaining to tax inclusive product pricing.
- Additional Rules actions to support configurable Add to Cart messages and Rules powered cart links.
- Updates to support the latest releases of Drupal, Entity API, Rules, and Views.
There are a variety of other bug fixes and a few minor API changes that made it into the release, so be sure to check the release notes. This is especially important if your site includes custom or contributed modules using the Commerce API. The release notes include update instructions and known issues pertaining to Views 3.0-rc3.
In addition to the great changes in the 1.1 release, contributed modules have seen a lot of recent activity. One of the most requested,Commerce Shipping, has matured in a 2.x branch to support advanced flat rate and carrier rated shipping quotes, as demonstrated in the variety of video tutorials released here on the blog recently. An additional 90 or so modules in various states of development have been listed in the Drupal Commerce contrib directory.
It's also exciting to see the firstfruits of our vision for developers to create use case specific distributions of Drupal Commerce with tailor made themes and user experiences. Drupal Commerce as an eCommerce framework simply won't be enough for all users out of the box, especially small merchants that expect to install a piece of software and start selling with minimal configuration. That's where distributions like MartPlug (for small merchants) and Open Deals App (a Groupon clone) come into play. I look forward to many more.
Finally, the stability of the release has been a welcome change from my experience managing Ubercart releases thanks to the great involvement of our users and the hundreds of automated tests covering the core Commerce functionality. More thanks are due to Randy Fay and others for their efforts to update Drupal's test bot to support projects with dependencies like ours. Contributors interested in making our automated tests even more efficient and comprehensive are most welcome. Just find me on IRC in #drupal-commerce for more information and a point in the right direction.