Shopp Releasing v1.3 Soon, Code Name "Mars"

I love code names. At one point I had a code name for everything, even code names for code names. My father implanted this interest at a very young age, most likely as a fun activity after seeing Warren Beaty’s version of Dick Tracy.

Man, that was a great movie.

Back to Shopp, they’ve recently announced that the development of Mars is wrapping up and that the community should be able to see this update come within the next few weeks.

Here’s what you can expect to see in version 1.3:

• Reports – Interactive sales reports with charting and exports
• 100% WPML compatibility
• Autoloading implementation for better memory management
• Schema.org product markup implementation in the Shopp content templates
• Abandoned shopping “cold storage” that will allow for shopping cart abandonment follow-up and even conversions
• Apply multiple taxes (different taxes, tax rates and compound taxes)
• Improved the dynamic storefront pages to have complete SEO plugin compatibility

You can also expect to see a round of bugs squashed, even “better code architecture” (unsure of what that means specifically), as well as a leaner shopping session data.

Also, if you missed the news, they announce a new initiative called The Workshopp, which is going to be something new for the community as a whole:

The Workshopp will be home to a collection of how-to articles, quick tips, best practices, development tutorials and screencasts written and produced by experienced Shopp professionals, members of the Shopp support team and the core development team.

If you’re interested in participating then you should email them here: [email protected]. They are looking for pitches and ideas for what you’d like to see covered and yes, you’ll even get compensated as they are looking to pay per article.

Here are some of the preliminary ideas they’ve seeded for your consideration:

• Shopp Developer API techniques
• Writing plugins for Shopp
• Shopp filter/action hooks
• Editing/customizing Shopp template files
• Setting up Addons properly
• Using Shopp configuration macros
• CSS styling tricks for Shopp starter templates
• Quick tip articles are around 500 words (plus or minus a couple hundred words or so).
• In-depth tutorials should be at least 1500-2500+
• Quick tip screencasts should be around 5 minutes.
• In-depth screencasts should target > 10 minutes and can be of any length that fits the content.

Blog posts, screencasts, video casts, you name it; it’s up for grabs.

Are you a fan of Shopp? How are you using the plugin for your own blogs and/or clients?

Oh, and here: