There has not been many updates about our 4.0 product and we get alot of questions on the status.

The new January CTP will be available shortly, our plan is within 2 weeks we will make it public. The new functionality will include:

1. Admin: Batch updates. allow you to quickly update all the fields (price, title, description, packaging ...) for products and skus. That should greatly enchance the productivity.
2. Additional charges: this functionality will allow you to specify any number of service charges per package. For example it can be gift wrapping charge or lift service for heavy package or any other sort of charge. It is very flexible and can be applied to individual skus. Charges can be required or optional which will allow customer to pick services he/she wishies during the checkout.
3. Improved checkout: now you will be able to select from the address book during checkout and save addresses for later. Checkout without registration will also be allowed with option to register at the end.
4. Public Site: ajax enabled purchasing process, where customer will be able to pick options, accessories without a need to refresh the page. This greately improves performance and makes shopping much more customer friendly.
5. Ability to ship items to multiple addresses within an order.
6. Inline editing: Ability to update the site right from the front end. The security model is now extened with a new "write" role which will allow user to update such things as title, description and other meta fields right from the site front end if he/she has appropriate "write" role. This can be further extended where certain user/customer will be able to update only certain product(s), certain category(es) or certain page(s).
7. Admin: auto resized images. you can now specify the images to be auto resized and thumbnails created when image is uploaded for image type meta attributes.
8. Virtual Pages now have meta class and template associated with it, so any number of attributes can be added to the virtual page and displayed using customer template on the frontend.
9. Admin: orders now have custom status, which is defined in the database. Order can also be updated in batch now.
10. Ordering: Accessories, SKUs, CrossSelling items all include sorting attribute.
11. Improved performance of administration pages, with context caching enabled.
12. Content pipes/filters: allows developer to replace/insert new content filters which are used to generate content for the web services. This will allow modifications made without need to recompile the core libraries.

These are just some highlights and there are many more small improvements and fixes. More details on these and other features will be posted later.

The CTP January will be almost feature complete release. We plan on releasing feature complete beta release within a month of CTP and the final release is still on schedule to be released in the first quater of 2006.

Thanks.