OXID Community Newsletter (3)

Welcome to our newest release of the OXID Community Newsletter. Many exiting things are going on in the OXID Community that we'd like to share with you.

OXID Commons, the OXID Community Day
The first OXID Commons will take place July 9th, 2009 in Freiburg, Germany. Meet the OXID folks and enjoy this community event that will be packed with technical and business talks about OXID's open source eCommerce products. Shop owners, users, developers, solution and integration partners will benefit from first hand information on how to win online business with OXID.

Early bird passes are on sale through May 15th for 50€. The standard price after May 15th is 70€.

The OXID Community is invited to submit talks or workshops. The call for papers is open and ends on May 15th. Topics of interest include developing with OXID, case studies, SEO tricks, ecommerce law, and more.

Find more information about OXID Commons and the Call for Papers at www.oxid-esales.com/commons.

OXID eXchange: Download and Upload Extensions
We just recently launched the beta of OXID eXchange. Using OXID eXchange, you can download or purchase modules, themes and language packs to extend core OXID eShop functionality. You can browse commercial and community extensions or add one yourself. During the beta phase no fee will be charged for sales of your commercial extensions.

Check out OXID eXchange and submit your extension at www.oxid-esales.com/en/exchange.

OXID eShop 4.1 with UTF-8 Support Released
Version 4.1 of OXID eShop Community Edition is out and ships with major improvements:


 * UTF-8 support: Now you can use all international character sets such as Cyrillic or Chinese for localized online shops
 * Import data from XTC and osCommerce to OXID eShop
 * Handle vendors and suppliers as separate groups
 * Performance improvements
 * Adding and sorting languages is much easier for Shop Owners in admin.

You can get a detailed preview in Ralf's blog posting and in the changelog.

Sitepoint Publishes Introduction to OXID eShop
Sitepoint has published a tutorial that explains the first steps in setting up your own online shop with OXID eShop: www.sitepoint.com/article/six-steps-start-selling-online/

UTF-8 Migration Woes
Shortly after releasing OXID eShop 4.1, we encountered a nasty little bug in the SQL update script. Due to one uncommented line, all database entries were converted to UTF-8 without asking first. Although we strongly recommend migrating, there might be some cases where shop owners want to stay with the old database format for a while.

Learn how to successfully cope with this issue in Marco's blog post.

More Frequent Maintenance Releases
Internally, we've improved our testing environment and rearranged our subversion repository into maintenance and trunk. This separation enables us to work on maintenance releases that provide bug fixes while in parallel also working on new major releases.

Details on the latest maintenance release OXID eShop is 4.1.1-18442 can be found in the changelog.

Maggi Shop Sells with OXID eShop
What else is cooking at OXID? The German Maggi Shop just went online using an OXID eShop. The Maggi brand is known worldwide for its instant soups, stocks, bouillon cubes, sauces, seasonings and instant noodles. The Maggi Shop has been implemented by our partner TWT Interactive GmbH and can be found at www.shop.maggi.de.