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osCommerce, an open source shopping cart, is one more step closer to reaching a 3.0 release.  Although the journey to completing the  osCommerce 3.0 software continues to take users and developers on a very long road,  Alpha 4 was released to the public on March 30th.  As a reminder,  alpha releases of osCommerce are for "testing to help fix and improve subsequent alpha releases for a final, stable, secure, and production ready 3.0 release".  In other words, you shouldn't use the software for a "live" store.

We've already talked about the new features added in earlier alpha versions of osCommerce 3.0 so there is no need to mention them in this article.  New features in Alpha 4 that have been added to the shopping cart since Alpha 3 include:

• Administration Tool access levels (about time)
• Administrator Log
• Administration Tool batch action capabilities

"Less and less, we're competing based on terms of functionality (open source CMS or not). Not features but ease of use, aesthetics, support, security, community, and documentation...will be critical differentiators."

- Dries Buytaert, "State of Drupal", 2007 Open Source CMS Summit and DrupalCon, Yahoo! Campus
 

A new version of ATutor is expected to be released in late April 2007 with a beta version already available for downloading.  ATutor is a Web-based Learning Content Management System (LCMS) designed with accessibility and adaptability in mind.  The new version of ATutor, 1.5.4, contains quite a number of changes with the most significant changes listed below:

Kshipra Singh from Packt Publishing sent me an e-mail the other day asking us to publish another one of their sample chapters here at CMS Report.   If you recall, we posted an article on one of the sample chapters from a book on Alfresco.  The book this time around is Mastering TypoScript: TYPO3 Website, Template, and Extension Development.  Long name for a title so why don't we dig a little deeper and find out what this book is really about.

TypoScript is a declarative programming language that offers developers, administrators, and designers full control over the configuration of TYPO3 and its template engine. Only with a good command of TypoScript can you leverage the powerful capabilities of the TYPO3 engine, to customize and control all aspects of your TYPO3 sites. If you're serious about TYPO3 as your content platform, you need to master TypoScript.

As before, I don't have the book in front of me and this should not be considered a review of the book.  Instead, I'm only allowing Packt Publishing through this post to give you a taste of what the book has to offer.  You need to decide for yourself if you want to buy the book.  The following is what the book intends for the reader to learn:

Michael Kaply has been writing a series of articles on how to deploy Firefox 2 within the Enterprise. I wrote last year that one of the difficulties of deploying Firefox and Thunderbird in the enterprise was the lack of tools Mozilla provided for deploying the software. I'm happy to say that Kaply's articles do a fairly good job on providing some solutions for those organizations that need to manage a large network of clients. Kaply's original intent is to cover the following topics regarding deployment of Firefox 2 within the enterprise:

Last week, Linux.com posted an article titled, Drupal vs. WordPress - Which is better for blogging?

I really can't display every open source project's invitation for college students to apply to Google's Summer of Code.  But just like the invitation from Drupal, WordPress would be another one of those projects I wouldn't have minded working on when I was going to college.