Freeway 1.5

Apologies for the delay letting you know about the progress of the project. Our development team has been hard at work on major improvements to Freeway but we have not been communicating about this.

Our biggest news is that Freeway is moving to use the Zend Framework as it’s base. We have more ambitious goals for our project now including out of the box, support for one million each of customers, products, event tickets, services bookings and subscriptions. Customer management and reports etc. must also scale to suit. We are changing to a wholly new architecture using a thin ecommerce layer with the vast majority of the applications running as pluggable extensions. You can read the full set of goals here on Launchpad. In short, Freeway is really growing up! You can learn about the Zend Framework here.

Name Change
With the launch of the 1.5 beta, get it here, we are going to change the name of the project to OpenFreeway. Most people call it OpenFreeway anyway and we think it better reflects our intention to be a fully GPL application.
During this week, we’ll release a beta version of OpenFreeway1.5. It has lots of great new features. At the current rate, we think 1.6 will be the last release before the conversion to the Zend Framework is completed.

New Features
As usual, there are some major improvements to OpenFreeway for 1.5.

* Customer Creation fields fully flexible and optional captcha added
* Events  now include optional and forced sub-events so we are getting much closer to being able to do conferences with streams.
* Point Of Sale updated to fully use AJAX for a much smoother sales process.

Conversion to Bazaar
With 1.5, we are moving away from Subversion for our code repository to Bazaar, the same version control system used by Ubuntu and MySQL. So rather than the main repository living on our servers, it will be on Launchpad.net. We’ll user Launchpad for its coderepository, project blueprints and bugtracking. We are still getting to know Launchpad but you can get the latest Freeway code from www.launchpad.net/openfreeway using Bazaar now.

Integration with Joomla
The integration with Joomla is working well now. We recently helped the Melbourne Joomla Day to sell their event tickets and T-Shirts and did a presentation at that event about the use of Freeway with Joomla. Once again, it was nice to see the surprise on people’s faces when they realized how powerful Freeway really is.

New Website
We will keep you much better informed about the progress of the project in future via our new website built in Joomla which will be launched during this coming fortnight. We are also going to be launching openfreeway.com for commercial solutions related to OpenFreeway this week as well.

Jentla – the Joomla Enterprise Layer
Our company ZacWare has recently released Jentla – the Joomla Enterprise Layer.  It brings a large range features like mult-site management and enterprise content workflows to Joomla so business and organizations can scale to manage up to 1000 Joomla sites. Take a look at www.jentla.com if you need to scale your CMS requirements. Freeway will be fully integrated with Jentla as well for huge deployments of localised eCommerce carts.

OpenFreeway PA-DSS
We have progressed our PA-DSS certification planning and have now moved openfreeway.org onto the new Cloud based infrastructure. We’re already eating our own dogfood! Take a look here  to see the infrastructure we have built and will soon be offering to OpenFreeway customers.

OpenFreeway is sponsored by ZacWare.