Two months after the initial beta, we've rolled a second major beta release (technically beta3) that should carry us into release candidate territory in the coming weeks. I'm very excited to welcome several first time contributors to Commerce in this release and especially the two entirely new Drupal contributors who finally made it into patch territory. Heck, even just posting an issue with a code correction in PHP tags works for me when you're just starting out. We can work you up from there. : )
Even more exciting to see is the traction amongst developers producing many of what I've labeled essential non-core modules on drupal.org. If you caught my session in Chicago, you'll know that our strategy with Drupal Commerce is to produce a lean core while supporting essential contributed modules as integral pieces to the project as a whole. We now have projects in development in sandboxes and on full project pages for shipping, file downloads, stock control, and more. I'll hopefully be presenting on these and others with Randy Fay in the Commerce Camp session track at DrupalCamp Colorado in early June.
You can read the release notes for information on what's changed and to read a detailed commit log. I can't say I wasn't a little burned out after DrupalCon Chicago, and my coder's writing block was only magnified by an insidious bug I "designed" into the price field's handling of amount values. However, after beating my head against the problem for a couple weeks with assists from Damien and Randy (in the problem solving, not the head beating), the issue was resolved. This resulted in some cascading bug fixes and served to jumpstart my internal code engine.
With Drupal Commerce 7.x-1.0-beta3, I cleaned out the "needs review" queue of some long-standing issues. I'm now staring down a variety of user experience improvements and minor issues our beta testers have turned up, and I'm feeling good about making quick work of the queue. We'd obviously love your help, and we're continuing to maintain our queue of "low-hanging fruit" for those developers looking to get involved in a major Drupal project without requiring an in-depth knowledge of Drupal 7 or our project's own idiosyncrasies.
As of now, I'm preparing to present Drupal Commerce and spend a whole day training potential new Drupal users on Drupal Gardens at next week's CMS Expo in Chicago. A month later, I'll be joining a host of other Commerce Guys in Denver for DrupalCamp Colorado to sprint on Commerce and introduce the project to even more users and developers. If you need a taste of the power and flexibility Drupal 7 and Commerce provide you for building e-commerce websites, look no further than the beautiful and highly customized solutions recently launched for Eurocentres and ioby. I'm thoroughly impressed with their work and appreciate all the feedback we've received from the developers of both projects. The Drupal community is an invaluable resource, and I look forward to reconnecting with everyone in Chicago and Denver.