Hard to believe, but December 9th will mark 100 days since the release of the Magento preview version and community site.

And as the numbers indicate, Magento could not have come a day sooner. The Magento preview version, which first piqued the interest of developers, designers and store owners when it was announced in April 2007, was an instant hit.

An active community, now 4,600+ members-strong, formed around Magento with a blistering pace. Eager to learn Magento, they installed the preview release, read the blogs, searched the knowledge base, viewed the screencasts and engaged each other and the Magento team in the forums.

And while the world gets acquainted with Magento, Varien continues to build upon its vision and improve upon the pains of current open source eCommerce experiences. From last month's preview release of Magento DataFlow, which will simplify the process for data importing and exporting, to the architecture behind Interface Extensions, which will make design updates a breeze, Magento has been developed from the ground up to be your next eCommerce platform.

Within the next 100 days:

• A Magento release candidate and production 1.0 version will launch
• New community features will be introduced
• An extensive partner network will be announced
• Magento Connect (A marketplace for the exchange of Magento products, extensions and services) will be getting off the ground

We are incredibly excited about the upcoming releases of Magento and expect 2008 to be a great year for eCommerce. Varien is committed to Magento for the long term, both in the US and abroad, and we will be going on a European and US tour next year to meet with Magento store owners, developers, designers and partners.

The community feedback has been great, and community support will play a large role in helping us produce the best open source eCommerce product on the market, so keep spreading the word about Magento to your friends, colleagues, partners, clients and anyone else interested in Open Source eCommerce Evolved.