It’s been a lot longer of a road to 1.0.5 than I ever expected, but well worth it in the end. My sincerest gratitude to the beta team that worked with me on this release. Without them, the level of quality achieved in this release wouldn’t be possible.

You can get the update using Shopp’s built-in auto-update system. Or if that fails you, you can always download updates using the download link available in your original purchase receipt. Login to your account to lookup your past orders. When upgrading manually, be sure to deactivate Shopp in your WordPress install first, upload and replace all files, then re-activate Shopp.

If there is one word to describe everything happening in 1.0.5 it’s polish. There’s a lot going on in 1.0.5. New features and enhancements have been included to fill out missing functionality. A ton of refinements both functionally, but also in architecture and organization make this version the most efficient yet.

Here are the highlights of what’s new in this release:

• Customer-defined donation amounts (variable donations)
• Date-based order filters
• Purchase log downloads in Tab, CSV and Microsoft Excel formats
• Printable orders using your receipt template
• Duplicate products feature
• New customizable administrative user interfaces for WordPress 2.7+
• Compatibility with WordPress 2.8
• Database and query optimizations for faster response and better scaling across very large catalogs
• New tags and tag options to make the template API even more powerful
• New error logging and notification system
• Product and category editing “workflows” feature – you have to use it to believe it
• Fixes for bugs in version 1.0.4 including: hidden empty categories in the admin, broken category product-templates, enhanced permalink implementation for better SEO, catalog page titles fix, subcategory tag issues, broken Google Checkout callback generator

The biggest improvement by far is the new administrative interfaces for the product, category and promotion editors that take advantage of the new user interface customization capabilities that were introduced with the WordPress 2.7 releases. You can now collapse panels you don’t need, drag them around to re-organize for your editing process and even remove panels you don’t use at all.

All in all, this release represents some subtle but significant steps forward in making Shopp an even more robust and reliable platform for developing and running online stores. I hope you enjoy it! And please, feel free to leave your comments to let everyone know your favorite new feature or refinement.