Well, my New Year's resolution of updating the blog often didn't last long! I'll try to redeem myself in the coming months.

Just wanted to give an update on what is going on in the X-Cart world, as this year should be an interesting one. First, X-Cart has a very good running list put together by forum users on features that should be available in v5. We are all hopeful that this new flagship cart will be as good as promised.

With the impending PA-DSS compliance deadline fast approaching (a little over a year now) we finally got an answer out of Qualitaem as to how they will be handling this. The v5 cart will be PA-DSS compliant out of the box, meaning you won't have to do anything to be PA-DSS and thus PCI-Compliant. For those of you who are using 4.0.x or 4.1.x versions of X-Cart, Qualiteam will be releasing a plug-in module that will essentially act as its own independent payment gateway, operating outside of X-Cart, which will allow those older versions of carts to also be PA-DSS compliant. I'm a little nervous about how easy this will be, as I don't really look forward to updating 150 carts the day before the regulations kick in! Let's hope they release these modules with plenty of time to spare.

I have been getting a lot of questions lately about what version of X-Cart they should be using. Most of the X-Cart professionals, myself included, are recommending to stay with 4.1.12, at least until v5 comes out at the end of the year. 4.2 is still extremely buggy, and with the upcoming release of 4.3, it doesn't appear that Qualiteam is paying much attention to making 4.2 stable. 4.3 may be a little better, but 4.1.12 is still a much more stable platform and will be fine until it is time to try out v5.

I have a long list of site launches which I will post shortly in another entry.