At the time of this announcement, I'll finally be packaging up our first release candidate of Drupal Commerce 1.0. This release has been a long time coming, and with the stabilization of other projects Drupal Commerce depends on, the time is ripe for us to move forward in our own development cycle. As a release candidate, we're saying that we believe the code is 1.0 ready pending a final period of testing. Our plan is to release the final 1.0 by DrupalCon London in preparation for our e-commerce training and presentations.
We entered into the beta phase in February in preparation for DrupalCon Chicago. Since then we've committed over 240 patches from dozens of contributors around the world, with over 70 of those patches coming in the last month alone. I'd characterize the latest work as tying up loose ends, including:
- Improving Add to Cart form management. It is now easier to build powerful, customized Add to Cart forms and product displays using simple settings in the field management interface. (See my last post for more information.)
- Accommodating customizable products. The code now supports multiple product line item types, allowing you to use custom Add to Cart forms for different types of products. You can now collect user information and product customizations through the Add to Cart form and store that information directly in the line item it creates.
- Improving support for international stores. We've committed improvements to product translation, multi-currency order total calculation, and the entering of product prices including VAT.
- Stabilizing our dependencies. This release depends on the latest stable releases of the other Drupal projects we work with. As part of this effort, we've contributed back to both Views and the Entity API, and Damien packaged up a much improved version of the Address Field module. This is a huge improvement over our constant dependence on dev releases, because we can now accurately package Commerce Kickstart to help new users ease into Drupal Commerce.
These changes and more make now a great time to try out Drupal Commerce if you've been holding out! With over 1,000 Drupal Commerce installations reporting in to drupal.org, you'll be in good company.
For a more complete summary and change log, be sure to check out the release notes. If you're updating an existing Drupal Commerce installation to the release candidate, please refer to the release notes to find important information to help your update process goes smoothly.
As I said above, we're targeting a final release of 1.0 any time before DrupalCon London. Between now and then, I'll be diving headfirst into contributed module development to flesh out various tools to empower store administrators. There are already dozens of great contributions, and our goal is to ensure that the modules providing essential e-commerce functionality are ready to roll on the latest release of Drupal Commerce.
Many thanks to all the contributors who have contributed code, documentation, and beta testing. It's exciting to see the project take off, and I can't wait to see more of you in the queue!