Minivend 4.0 alpha release

MiniVend is the most powerful free shopping cart system available today. Its features and power rival the costliest commercial systems.

****** message to minivend-announce from mikeh@minivend.com******

MiniVend 4 is up for ALPHA use. For those who don't know what alpha is:

• not recommended for use in production systems
• expected to have major bugs or deficiencies
• largely untested
• back up your disk before you use it

If that scares you, please don't try it.

http://www.minivend.com/alpha/minivend-4.0alpha3.tar.gz

On the other hand, it hasn't blown up any of the 10 or so systems it is currently installed on. But your mileage may differ.

It will run, but not install automatically, on Windows. In the future, Windows will only be supported by a binary distribution. But that may take some time.

MiniVend 4 requires, repeat REQUIRES, Perl 5.005. It shouldn't even begin to install without it. This is not negotiable and all pleas to make it run on 5.004 will be ignored out of hand.

The documentation is lame at this point, and the users guide is not included in the distribution. It is in a few man pages and some files in the same directory as the tar.gz file.

http://www.minivend.com/alpha/minivend.pod
http://www.minivend.com/alpha/minivend.html

Please pay attention to the WHATSNEW file.

http://www.minivend.com/alpha/WHATSNEW

There should be an installation guide and users guide available sometime not too long after Y2K; it is being written by professional technical writer.

I don't want to hear about:

• deficiencies in the demo
• deficiencies in the utilities, i.e. expire and dump
• that you don't know how to install it
• the fact that it doesn't work with your current catalog
• the fact that it won't install on Windows

I DO want to hear about:

• bugs in the software
• suggestions for clearer tag syntax
• problems with the new tags
• problems with the ASP interface
• suggestions for additions to the compat/* tag set, preferably already written and tested

I know there are quite a few of you out there who will run this against all good advice; you should be a relative wizard to try it. But it is your time... 8-)

All in all, though, I am excited about this software. It is much better, at least under the hood, than MiniVend 3. What it needs is polish and testing, and that process can now start.

Thanks to all who use Minivend; it makes my life interesting!

--
Mike Heins
http://www.minivend.com/
Internet Robotics
131 Willow Lane, Floor 2
Oxford, OH 45056
mikeh@minivend.com
513.523.7621 FAX 7501