Shopp’s forthcoming 1.3 release, codenamed Mars, is shaping up nicely and will have a number of goodies for merchants and developers alike.
Merchants will enjoy the new report suite – which looks fantastic – a particular favourite of mine being the map-based location report. As ever this has been designed with an eye to the future, so that new types of report can be added, both by the core Shopp team and by third party developers.
Slick map-based sales reports
There have been no shortage of feature requests, many from developers who want to do new and interesting things or expand Shopp’s capabilities to meet the needs of individual clients, and a large number of these requests have been accepted, resulting in interesting new changes.
Previously, for instance, adding new components to the meta boxes that make up many of Shopp’s admin screens was comparatively difficult. In 1.3 it will be possible to add new elements to every single meta box, adding a whole new dimension of customizability.
Developers can now easily add new visual components to meta boxes like this one (from the order admin screen)
We’re also going to see the work I previously released as a plugin to improve performance by speeding up the delivery of product images included as part of the Shopp core and a whole ton of other improvements including changes to to the promotion system (now renamed “Discounts”), our admin menu structure and more.
Look forward to an official announcement over on shopplugin.net about the next phase of testing for this important release 
