Well, today is a big day for us. We’re releasing DukaPress 2.0 Beta right here, and right now!

Grab the download here. The Beta Testing period is now over. Get DukaPress 2.0 here.

Why Beta?
We chose to go with a beta version for two main reasons (and many smaller ones):

1. Before we upload it to the official WordPress plugin repository we want it to be as bug-free as possible so that it can work even better for you guys. We love you. 🙂
2. DukaPress 2.0 is fully internationalized. This means you can easily translate it into your own language without mucking about in the code. We hope that during the beta testing some of you will translate it into your own language and be kind enough to let us include that into the main official release.

Please note that this Beta release is fairly stable and only very minor bugs remain (from our internal testing so far) and we’re actually using it in actual production websites. However, be cautious because it is indeed still beta software.

The New Features
So, are you ready to test? Before you begin, let’s talk about the new features:

1. Obviously there are tons of bugfixes. We hope we caught them all, or at least the big ones. 🙂
2. There is a new widget that lets you put DukaPress products in your sidebar, or any widget area on your site. You can put products with/without a thumbnail and/or the add to cart button.
3. The code is fully internationalized and should be easy to translate. 🙂
4. The checkout fields are now verified – meaning that someone wanting to checkout has to actually fill them and provide a valid email address.
5. User registration – the plugin automatically creates a new user for your site whenever someone checks out. The username of the user is the email address they provided and WordPress assigns them a password automatically. This feature can be turned on or off (default is off).
6. Customer order logs – there is a new shortcode, [dp_order_log], which creates a customer order log if put on a page or post. Your customers (if registered) can view their past orders on this page.
7. The currency code is now shown on the invoice PDF document generated with each order
8. The admin-side CSS had a bug that affected some things on the WordPress back end. This has been fixed.

Update 6 Dec 2010, other features:

1. It is now possible to order the products produced by the grid as either ascending, descending, or randomly.
2. The order log in the admin side is now paginated

To support DukaPress, we’re also adding the option to buy premium addons. DukaPress will forever be free, do not worry about that. And we will see to it that the free version can very easily support a simple shop without forcing you to purchase upgrades – we promise you that. The addons are just things that would be cool/nice/useful but which are not really needed for a basic shop. We already have two addons ready for you:

1. Simple SlideShow
2. Shipping Pro

Again, these premium addons are meant to enable us to support the DukaPress project and keep investing time and resources into making DukaPress the most simple and most powerful WordPress e-commerce platform. We ask you to support us in our endeavor to do this.

Anyway, please download and test DukaPress 2.0 Beta so that we can make it better for all of us.

Here is the download link again. The Beta Testing period is now over. Get DukaPress 2.0 here.

Incase you cannot download and test, please test how DukaPress behaves on our Duka Demo.

We hope you find many bugs and report them here so that we can fix ASAP. In case you don’t… well, enjoy DukaPress 2.0!

Thank you.