Howdy folks. This announcement has been a long time a’comin’ but the zen cart developers have finally announced that zencart 1.4 will not ever come out. Does this mean the end of zen cart? Is the soon to be released 1.3.9 to be the summation, the culmination, the termination of all things zen cart?

Hmmm. well no. What it actually means is that Zen Cart 2.0 is coming out! The advancements put in place are revolutionary in scope. Latest versions of php and mysql are REQUIRED. ALL templates and plugins will need to be redesigned! ALL. This is a major redesign… kinda like going from Windows to a Mac. Everything is going to be different and radically faster. There are less queries to the database which means a massive increase in speed of pages rendering and a big decrease in load on mysql on the server.  

I feel this is a massive announcement and quite bold. Add-ons will become plug and play like in WordPress. Less design work will be needed as a lot of this will be taken care of in the admin section. I personally hope this DOES lead to something elegant like the admin of a wordpress.  It will be a radical change for people to learn it but it will be beautiful and fast and a needed revolution.

Stay tuned folks. I’ll be demoing the beta soon and will provide screencasts of these improvements and hopefully avoiding all of the bugs! 😀