Chris Cyvas

I am really pleased and excited to announce that the upcoming release of dashCommerce (up to this point referred to as dashCommerce 3.0) will be released as dashCommerce Professional! This is a huge step for the dashCommerce project, and one to which I have committed the last 4 months. Over the last 2+ years I have witnessed a huge amount of change in the project. In 2005 I got involved with the project as a community member (in the CSK 1.0 days), then I was asked to become a contributor to the project in 2006 for CSK 2.0, and then in the beginning of 2007 I started pushing releases out (2.0.1 and then 2.2.0) which lead to my current role for the last 10 months as project manager / dev lead. I know there will may be some questions about this decision, so I’ll try to answer some of the anticipated ones now:

Is dashCommerce still open source?

dashCommerce OS (dashCommerce 2.2.0), as the open source project will now be branded, is still open source and will continue to be open source.

What is the future for dashCommerce OS?

dashCommerce OS will continue along as it has, but there will be a minor shift to more community driven development.

But I thought dashCommerce 3.0 was going to be open source, why the change?

That has been the plan, but over the last 4 months I’ve been constantly evaluating the project and looking for ways to move the project forward. Adding a commercial aspect to the project will solidify the future and growth of the open source solution.

But now it’s not true open source!

Sure it is, open source is open source. And please understand that commercialization of the CSK / dashCommerce was always in the plan (trust me, there have many ranglings over this fact behind the scenes), it’s just never happened until now.

When will dashCommerce Professional be available?

We will be starting the beta testing next week so I would expect the beta to be available in the next 2 – 3 weeks, depending on the results of our internal testing.

What will the pricing for dashCommerce Professional look like?

I am still evaluating the price point options now, but we will be offering reduced pricing for customers who take the plunge on the beta and they will receive free upgrades to the release version.

Will there be an upgrade path for dashCommerce OS to dashCommerce Professional?

Unfortunately not. These are really two completely different products. dashCommerce Professional incorporates functionality that is not easily supported by the dashCommerce OS architecture.

What are some of the highlights of dashCommerce Professional?

dashCommerce Professional has an enormous amount of functionality. I have taken the last 2+ years of working with this product and tried to make the platform that I would want both as a developer and an end user. Some of the highlights of dashCommerce Professional are:

Inventory Control

• Per Product Inventory
• Per Product Option / Attribute Combination Inventory
• Quick and Easy Inventory Management

Checkout / Order Management

• Order Messages / Email Notifications
• Configurable Tax Rates
• SSL based checkout
• Order Status Change Email Notifications for Customers
• Shipping Tracking
• Drop-In Configurable Tax Providers
• Drop-In Configurable Shipping Providers
• Drop-In Configurable Payment Providers
• Drop-In Configurable Coupon Providers
• Configurable Handling Fees

Supported Providers

• PayPal
• SimpleWeight Shipping Provider
• RegionCode Tax Provider
• Mettle Systems Tax Provider (Real Time, tax tables are updated monthly)*
• USPS (Real Time)*
• UPS (Real Time)*
• Many more on the way . . .

Other Features

• Content Management
• Extensive Site Settings
• Widgets
• Drop-In Themes / CSS
• Fully Localizable

I’ll be compiling an exhaustive list over the next few weeks . . .

* May not be available for the beta release.

One of the features of dashCommerce Professional that I am particularly excited about is our support for Drop In providers. This allows anyone to create a Payment, Tax, Shipping, and Coupon providers and drop them in to the dashCommerce system. So, third party component developers will be able to create and sell their providers on dashCommerce.com. I’ll be putting together a screencast on how to do this in the near future, so watch for it if you are interested.

I guess that makes it alpha,  but tonight I was able to get to my goal of the functionality for dashCommerce 3.0 – and to boot, my goal was to get that functionality completed by tonight. So, while there are some pieces still left to do, the bulk of the work is completed. Now the focus is on cleaning some things up and adding in the little bits and pieces of polish that will get it to Beta. I will also be shifting focus a little bit to the long promised screen-casts. We’ve had a good response on the translations, so my expectation is that dashCommerce 3.0 should go out with language support for about 15 languages (this is a guess based on the number of folks that have volunteered). There will be both resource files and language packs to translate for database look-ups so they can be used for reporting, grids, etc.

With the next release of dashCommerce, I have released most of the providers from their prison. By this I mean that dashCommerce 3.0 will come with the PayPal Standard and PayPal Pro Payment Providers, a SimpleWeight Shipping Provider and a RegionCode Tax Provider that takes the place of both the ZeroRate and FlatRate Tax Providers and for those of you that just want to charge a real flat rate with no dependencies on Zip Codes, or whatever, then you can use the RegionCode Tax Provider for this as well because it has a default rate override.

Having all the providers in the code base is proving to be a non-starter – we just can’t test all the permutations.

In one of my previous posts I mentioned that part of running this project is about releasing some control and so the other Payment, Tax, and Shipping Providers will be made available for sale on the new dashCommerce.com site that will be out with the 3.0 Release. So, if you are a component developer type, then you’ll be able to put them up for sale on dashCommerce.com as well. I’ll be writing some new providers as well, such as a Tax Provider for US and Canada that will use tax rates that are updated monthly and we will probably make this available to the folks that host with us as well. The aim of this initiative is to allow for the most amount of provider components to be developed for dashCommerce.

dashCommerce 3.0 is moving along well and there is a lot more functionality in the core product, but in order to add this stuff, I’ve had to pull somethings that were in the 2.2.0 version that were not complete in my mind. Specifically, Promotions, Campaigns, and Bundles. These were more like starting points or proof-of-concepts in my mind, so for the time being, they will not be in the 3.0 release. I don’t have any feeling as to when or if they will be added back in. There’s not a whole lot in the forums on them, so my thinking is that most folks aren’t using them. As I’ve mentioned before, this release is about removing obstacles, so the focus is on having a stable product that does what it is supposed to do and does it well.

dashCommerce is currently licensed under the MPL 1.1 and I am reviewing that for the 3.0 release – does anybody have any strong feelings about this? – please think about the success of the project long term – I get a lot of comments from folks looking out for #1 and not the project, so if you have an opinion, please give me some good, solid thoughts behind it.

Also, I’d like to take the opportunity to clarify something that I have seen bubbling around on the forums that I feel it is important to clarify . . . I don’t work for Microsoft or PayPal, nor do I receive any support or contract work from them. (Well, Microsoft gave me an MSDN Subscription, so that was nice.) Nor do I receive any referrals from them. But, I think folks should know this fact because I think there is an impression that I work for Microsoft, PayPal, or CodePlex. There’s actually a post on the forums thanking the CodePlex team for writing dashCommerce.

And finally, screencasts are coming soon . . . I promise.