The second beta in the Interchange 5.5 development series
was released today,
paving the way for a full 5.6.0 (stable) version to be created
in time to be shown off at LinuxTag 2008.
We anticipate making only minor changes between this beta release
and the upcoming stable 5.6.0 version.
You can help improve the upcoming stable version by downloading
this beta release,
installing it,
testing it and reporting your experience
to the interchange-users mail list.
Interchange development snapshots and beta releases have a long
history of stability,
so we actively encourage experienced developers go ahead
and use this release for new deployments and upgrades.
This Interchange RTFM website is continually upgraded to run the latest
development version,
which is available from CVS and as a
daily development snapshot 
.
Notable changes since the last Interchange stable release (5.4.2) include:
- Security fix for the Standard demo's "special_pages/missing.html" page.
See the security announcement that was posted on this Interchange RTFM website in February 2008.
- Security fix for a DoS vulnerability that was exploitable using a carefully crafted HTTP POST request.
- Support for the Unicode UTF-8 character set.
This is classed as experimental in this 5.5.2 beta release, although it is working well on this Interchange RTFM website.
- Improvements to the PreFork server mode for heavy traffic and faster servers.
- New universal "hide" parameter for use with most of the Interchange Markup Language (ICML) tags.
- New Sage, Getitcard, Protx and NetBilling payment modules included in the release.
- New Vend::Swish search module that uses Swish-e's Perl API.
- New BounceReferrals directive, which could prove useful for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
- New weight_callout SpecialSub hook for post-processing shipping weights.
- Uniform ActionMap API (change made to the previous global ActionMap API).
Note that this change will require a small change to all of your existing global ActionMaps.
- Country code top-level domain support for the DomainTail facility, via a new CountrySubdomains directive.
- Improvements to Interchange's support for product options.
- Interchange now changes the process command name to provide easier status reporting via the ps and the like.
- More languages are supported with supplied translation text (mostly for the admin system).
- Support for Perl versions 5.8.5 and later that were built to include threads support.
Note that a performance penalty will be incurred when running Interchange with a Perl built with threads.
Also note that Interchange will issue a thread-related warning upon startup unless your threaded Perl version is 5.8.8 or above.
- Support for Perl version 5.10.0.
Please read the UPGRADE file,
included in the tar archive,
for information about the upgrade procedure,
and the small number of backward-incompatible changes introduced
with this beta release.
Also see the
WHATSNEW
file to find out what else is new.
As usual,
Interchange can be downloaded from either of the following locations:
