Some updates for 2019

With the release of Zen Cart 1.5.6b, Zen Cart is now fully compatible with PHP 7.3 and MySQL 5.7. We don't anticipate a Zen Cart 1.5.6c release, but there may be a small one if a high priority bug is found.

So what's next?

As many of you know, Zen Cart has been following a two-track development plan for several years, working on the current (1.X) release stream, and a new (2.X) release stream at the same time.
We've made good progress, and we're excited about and proud of the work we've done in 2.0 - but finishing it and getting people to adopt is going to take more resources than we have at the current time.

For this reason, we have decided to put the 2.0 project on the back-burner, and focus on making 1.X great!
This does not mean the v2.x branch is dead and forgotten. There are a lot of ideas and code that can be re-purposed for v1.x.

So really - what's next?

Work has begun on a 1.5.7 release of Zen Cart. Like all new Zen Cart releases, this one will improve the speed, reliability and security of the product, but we also want to build out the core more with key features customers demand in an ecommerce platform.

For this release and future releases we intend to incorporate a number of the most useful/popular plugins.
e.g Guest Checkout, Single page checkout and others.

We also intend to expand and improve core code to allow for much easier integration and installation of plugins.