For the first time, an alpha version of osCommerce 3.0, an e-commerce application written in PHP, was released to the public for testing writes Bryan in a new post. While this third alpha was made available to the general public, the first two alpha releases were made only available to osCommerce's community sponsors, he explains.

According to osCommerce, the "alpha releases are made to showcase the new features being worked on and to generalize a version specific for testing to help fix and improve subsequent alpha releases for a final, stable, secure, and production ready 3.0 release".
Some of the new features that are made available in this release include:

• New Object-Oriented (OO) framework (alpha 1)
• New installation routine (alpha 1)
• register_globals and magic_quotes_gpc compatibility (alpha 1)
• New template structure implementation (alpha 1)
• Search-engine optimizations (alpha 1)
• Service modules (alpha 1)
• Checkout procedure cleanup (alpha 2)
• Updated payment modules with post-transaction actions (alpha 3)
• Catalog front-end, administration tool, and installation routine combined (alpha 3)
• XHTML/CSS based default template layout for the catalog side (alpha 3)
• Multiple product images implementation (alpha 3)