OXID Community Newsletter (8)

Long time no see :-) We want to let you know about what happened in the last few weeks, leading up to the recent OXID eShop 4.3.0 release.

OXID eShop 4.3.0 released
OXID eShop 4.3 ships with some exciting new features. The new automatic image resize mechanism significantly reduces management of product pictures. Upload one master picture for a shop item and OXID eShop will seamlessly generate all required sizes of that image to be included in various item views. Furthermore, the new version automatically generates rich snippets for Google Search. You can now use OXID eShop for English sites out of the box with a cleaned up GUI and sample data. Upgrade with ease from any previous version with the new cumulative update feature. We have also published our Unit Tests with the new release. Learn more about OXID eShop 4.3.0.

New article on PHPbuilder.com - PHP Module Programming with OXID eShop CE
Readers familiar with coding might be interested in Andreas Ziethen's article on PHPBuilder about using the OXID eShop framework. Andreas Ziethen has been an OXID Premium Solution Partner for many years. In his article, he starts by describing the installation process of OXID eShop on a server. It continues with a basic description of the OXID eShop software architecture and finally provides helpful hands-on instructions on how to access the module APIs to tweak the built-in content management system of OXID eShop.

oxchkversion v3 Released: Enhanced Consistency Checking Tool for OXID eShop Upgrades
Your shop may do strange things, especially after updates or upgrades. Sometimes, when you suspect a bug, you turn to the forums and recognize that nobody else has had the problem. In these situations, a checking tool for the consistency of your files is very useful. We recently published the oxchkversion tool that we have used as a secret swiss army knife for a long time in our support team. It is just one file that you copy to your server and open in your browser.

New languages available
A couple of new languages have been made available by some of the community members. Slovanian, Russian, Italian and Dutch are ready to use with the front end of OXID eShop. The Russian language file for the admin panel is also available, while Dutch and Italian admin panels are still in progress. Just copy the lines in the code boxes to a new file called lang.php and save it to the appropriate place on your web server. As it might cause trouble if your editor program doesn't like specific characters, we are about to build the files and offer them for download at the OXID project site. If you fancy helping with that, go ahead!

OXIDforge got revamped
On OXIDforge, the content and functionality have grown steadily and organically since it was introduced in May 2009. We now needed to consider restructuring the OXID community platform to provide better access to the vast amount of new resources and properties. We have made OXIDforge much easier to navigate by introducing a new header and top navigation as well as landing pages featuring all developer resources at a glance.

How is OXID eShop being developed by the vendor?
You may wonder how we make decisions about the roadmap. There are many aspects to consider: An owner of an existing online store definitely has different needs than a programmer or the Community Management trying to extend the community. Also, there are the needs of the OXID sales and the support team to consider. We have described the development process so that third-party developers can better coordinate their efforts and cooperate with us on enhancing the eShop eCommerce system.

What is OXIDlab?
OXIDlab is an account that is used by OXID developers and support representatives to publish prototypes or test implementations prepared by our teams. Feel free to use the modules, extensions or code snippets for your own purposes. If you like, you can even join us in developing them at http://projects.oxidforge.org/.

Bug statistics
In this section, we will regularly inform you about bug statistics. As of today, there are 91 bugs open. 18 of them have been marked as "major" bugs, 54 with a severity of "minor". 14 of the bugs were in the admin panel, the rest are spread over all other categories. The average bug lifetime at the moment is at about 19 days.

Get 20% off of the regular ticket prices for OXID Commons
Do you have any further questions? Ask us face-to-face at OXID Commons on May 6th. Don’t miss the second event around eCommerce and OXID. We would like to offer 20% off of our regular ticket prices to our community members. For ticket registration, please send an e-mail with the discount code OxComS-3fA4p to marketing [at] oxid-esales [dot] com. Please find more information about OXID Commons at http://www.oxid-esales.com/de/news/oxid-commons-2010.