Magento eCommerce CE Community Edition Version 1.4.0 Stable now available

Magento eCommerce CE Version 1.4.0.0 Stable is available for upgrade and download. This release includes many new features such as Widgets, WYSIWYG editor. support for 3D Secure, and many further improvements from Magento CE 1.3.x.

Please be carefull, 1.3 templates breaking up with this new version due to changes in html structure and css classes. We are advising to be patient and not to upgrade production systems.

Major improvements since 1.3

• Implemented 3D Secure credit card validation (Visa and Mastercard)
• Full reimplementation of PayPal modules, includes lot of new functionality and numerous bugfixes
• Full review of frontend themes, introduced design cross-package fallback and the base/default theme. Includes SEO and accessibility enhancements. Changes are oriented to dramatically reduce themes maintenance.
• Added ability to define arbitrary cache backends
• Optimized performance of sales reports, added new sales report types
• Added image/media uploader/browser, that can browse entire media folder
• Optimized performance of search indexer
• Made order processing workflow more informative and severe
• Reimplemented 404 and report pages, introduced 503 page, specifically for maintenance purposes
• Improved javascript files merging, added CSS files merging

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Growth of eCommerce in Europe

The prospects for the e-commerce sector look very healthy over the next few years. nVision predicts a 70% growth in the proportion of people shopping online. By 2013, almost half of the europeans are expected to have purchased something online, up from 21% in 2006. Numbers are expected to grow most repeadly on southern europe. Low penetration of broadband and underdevelopped attitude in regard to shopping online will result in lower number than northen countries. In North-Western Europe, it is France that is predicted by many to provide much of the medium-term growth in internet shopping, as the recent upsurge in broadband connections has not (yet) been mirrored by higher levels of online shopping (and these two factors are usually directly correlated). 

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Woopra, real live analytics and tracking of website visitors, just great and a bit addictive

We are already using Woopra for few months now. What a great product Woorpa is for web analytics and completely free of charge. Woopra can be compared with Google Analytics, but Woopra is really live:

• How many visitors are visiting your site at this moment
• Where are your visitors coming from
• What are they reading/doing, with all possible details
• Referrers
• Search queries
• Pages visited
• Popular keywords

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Drupal, Joomla, Typo3: Big Three Showdown

	Typo3 is a free Open Source content management system for enterprise purposes on the web and in intranets. It offers full flexibility and extendability while featuring an accomplished set of ready-made interfaces, functions and modules.
	Drupal is an open source content management platform. Equipped with a powerful blend of features, Drupal supports a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites. And yes, from Belgium!
	Joomla! is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable.

Dutch Open Source has written a great functional review of the new versions of the three big open source content management systems: Typo3, Drupal and Joomla. In their functional analysis they have reviewed security, ease of use, performance, interoperability, flexibility, basic functionality, e-commerce.

And the winner is?

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