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.