Magento released version 1.4.0.0 Alpha1 for testing by the community. This package uncompressed is 51.4 MB in size and contains 9,274 files compared to 44.5 MB and 7,511 files for version 1.3.2.3. WinMerge has identified 780 changed text files in this release compared to the previous release.

This version promises to solve many bugs and include a raft of new and/or updated features. The nice thing about making this release available to the community at large is that it gives us an opportunity to see what's coming up. For me it means I'll be better prepared to update Grow with Magento as soon as the release is stable. While I have no plans to update my test installation with an alpha version, I will be studying the changed files and identifying the features most likely to be impacted.

This is an exciting development in the evolution of the Magento platform and I am looking forward to the stable release.