Fontis is pleased to announce the release of Mercator, a community driven distribution of Magento. The Magento community has matured to the point where an amazing number of valuable open source contributions have been released, and Mercator expands upon the Community Edition feature set by bringing together the best of these extensions into a cohesive distribution. Code is now on GitHub, and already includes a number of additional features in its initial commit that have been integrated through community extensions.
The project has the following goals:
- Include the best community extensions to add the most commonly required features, tested and integrated to ensure they work together.
- Provide a better platform for new projects that does not prioritise backwards compatibility with official Magento releases. This allows core changes and fixes where appropriate.
- Present an alternative to Enterprise Edition, with a similar feature set but under an open source licensing and development model.
- Continue support and development of the Magento 1.x codebase.
Why another fork? The goals of the project are different enough from other prominent forks (e.g. Mage+) that we feel a new codebase is warranted. In particular, we are not attempting to rigidly maintain backwards compatibility, so the intent is that we are free to make breaking changes when it is deemed necessary.
The initial commit includes all the standard features of Magento Community Edition, plus the following new features:
- Enhanced admin product grid
- Integrated blog
- Enhanced cron scheduler admin interface
- Redis cache backend
- Support for changing a product's attribute set
- Custom shipping rates that can be used for admin panel order creation
- Quick admin panel navigation
Further additions are planned, and we welcome input on any extensions that may be good candidates for inclusion. We are also looking for other collaborators to contribute directly to the project, and would invite interested developers to join us on GitHub and get involved.