Zen Cart 1.3.9a is FINALLY HERE!  The wait is over folks!  Huzzah! and Hooray! Some killer upgrades are finally here!  I’ll give a breakdown on what is in this over the next week!

via Zen Cart v1.3.9a — Officially Released! – Zen Cart Support.

Please note this is ZenCart 1.3.9 BETA!  TEST ONLY! Report back to the forum here! Do not use this on a LIVE Site folks!

v1.3.9 BETA AVAILABLE – Zen Cart Support.

The below comes from the man, the myth… Dr. Byte himself!

PHP 5.3 was released a few months ago, and along with it come many problems due to the PHP authors’ decisions to backport many PHP 6 features into 5.3 and deprecate several oft-required functions.

In so doing, they broke many things affecting Zen Cart operation in v1.3.8a and older.

We are preparing a patch which can be used by those whose hosts have upgraded (or have announced imminent plans to upgrade) to PHP 5.3.

We hope to post the patch here very soon. It’s in regression testing now.

When the patch is ready it will be announced here in the Announcements area.

via PHP 5.3 Support – Zen Cart Support.

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!