Hurray, most powerfull, most robust, most feature reach and best of all FREE and opensource, ecommerce shopping cart software script is out of its BETA stage and released first ever production version.

Which of course is good news and you can right now start your own online-shop with it, because its stable enough to be deployed on production sites.

Oh, and there is thank you note of course to you from Varien’s Magento:

To everyone who spread the word about Magento, told a friend, wrote in blogs, posted and commented in the Magento forums, subscribed to our newsletter, downloaded one (or more) of our 11 preview releases, reported bugs, participated in the Magento community, to the online merchants who waited for Magento 1.0, developers and designers who convinced their clients to wait for the product and our partners who recognized the potential — Thank you for believing.

Go grab your own copy of Magento [HERE]

After months of work, Varien’s Magento - shopping cart that wants to develop de facto open-source e-commerce standard, is now ready for his first ever stable 1.0 release.

Main site will be down for a while, but you can still follow them on Twitter.

Hold your breath…

Quote from a recent Magento Forum post:

I have been working with ecommerce software for quite sometime. I am very impressed with Magento. I believe it will become the de facto standard for open source e-commerce software … it is so well done and does so many things right. I wanted to post a ‘congrats’ and ‘thank you’ to all responsible. I look forward to contributing what I can to this incredible project!

Developers of Magento today listed top 5 Magento features that they fave most, those appear to be:

• Layered Navigation
• Multiple site control from a single admin interface
• Multiple themes and design flexibility
• Catalog and Shopping Cart price rules (Magento’s rule-based pricing system)
• Checkout Process - single page checkout and multiple ship-to addresses functionality

If you have not checked it out, you definately should do it here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/

We recently discussed open-source, web 2.0 eCommerce software (Script) “Magento” - Its still beta and got updated today.

New version is 0.7.14800 and now includes new kind of installer and automated package upgrades, what does it mean?

When you download and unpack the installer package on your server, the installer wizard downloads and installs the latest available Magento Packages directly to your server. Since the installer has a smaller file size, you don’t have to upload every file to your server - it only contains the bootstrap files (the files necessary to run the installer itself, and basic configuration for Magento).

even already installed Magento shop can now be updated with one click from the admin panel. From now on you can go to: System -> Extensions -> Remote screen and view there installed and available packages, also from there you can check for upgrades.

Install process video: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-on-the-fly/install-process

Upgrade process video: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-on-the-fly/example-upgrade-process-magento

Now lets talk about new features and (more…)

Well, Magento might not be as popular as oscommerce and zen-cart, but it really worths trying, Magento got Web 2.0 look, packed with features (such as Tags and product comparison) and develops rapidly, did I mentioned it’s also free?

They reached 100 000 downloads today, which really is something… and they are very thankfull indeed:

This is an incredible achievement that could not have happened without the support of the community. We are very grateful and look forward to what’s shaping out to be an exciting 2008 for eCommerce.

Happy New Year everyone!

What to say? Good luck Magento.