If you've been watching the journey of Hotcakes Commerce over the years at all, you know that it has a very interesting past. It began as a different platform altogether. It became a wildly successful commercial e-commerce solution that consistently was in the top 3 products in the DNN Store. It then became an open-source e-commerce platform, making it freely available to the world. This is the solution you're reading about and know about today.
These milestones seem almost like lore that doesn't exist, even to me, and I've lived through and experienced most of it. Today, we've released version 03.03.00 and this is easily the most substantial and important release we've been a part of since 2.0 was released several years ago.
It's been personally exciting for me to see the Hotcakes community get reignited and help grow it since we made it open-source with version 3.0.
By my estimate, there are easily thousands of new Hotcakes Commerce installations since version 3 was released. It's easy to assume a certain percentage of these instances have since become full-blown successful e-commerce stores. Exact numbers are difficult to come by due to the nature of open-source, but the downloads and website analytics are key indicators. It's safe to say that people love Hotcakes! (That pun is 100% intended.)
Hotcakes 3.3.0 By The Numbers
Today, version 03.03.00 has been made publicly available. Here are a handful of metrics that have me especially excited.
We have 3 people that have sponsored our efforts through GitHub Sponsors. That doesn't sound like a lot, but every little bit helps.
This release includes code updates from 6 different people. There are 39 pull requests and 28 issues closed in this release.
The most significant pull request involves removing Telerik RadControls from the codebase and this pull request alone spanned at least 3 GitHub issues and 53 commits touching 720 files. I didn't quantify that until writing that just now... That's just mind-blowing as I look at it!
If I were to estimate how much of Hotcakes Commerce was fully localized prior to this release, I'd guess it would have been around 70% localized. At this point, I feel very confident in saying that at least 95% of the solution has been localized, including the administration menu.
If you look at the release notes, there are 9 highlights (not including optimizations to the build and release process), 20 enhancements, and 22 bug fixes. These numbers don't include the localization updates, which I'd guess would increase the bug fix number by at least 15-20 (if they each had an issue to track them).
I wouldn't be able to compare the numbers above with those from version 2.0 because that commercial logging system has since been deleted, but having been part of both release processes, I can tell you that both releases had a massive amount of energy and effort put into them. This time, though, there wasn't a commercial team paid to do those updates.
Why are those numbers important?
That's easy! Trust.
These numbers tell us that if Hotcakes Commerce was already one of the most popular options for any DNN website owner to use for all kinds of shopping cart/e-commerce implementations, these statistics only further solidify the fact that no other e-commerce solution has as much adoption, activity, and ownership by the DNN ecosystem and community.
You can rest easy and continue to trust the viability, dedication, and support by our sponsors, our team, and our community who all have been actively contributing to this and prior releases.
Download Hotcakes Commerce
Anyhow, I'll shut up now and let the release notes and the release both speak for themselves. I just wanted to let you know how excited I am to present this fresh batch of Hotcakes for you today. Enjoy!
DO NOT upgrade Hotcakes before you first read through the release notes.
Download Hotcakes Release Notes