This evening I released Drupal Commerce 1.6 after a fun sprint of last minute bug fixing and feature postponing. My condolences to those whose favorite upcoming features didn't make the cut. : )

The last release of the core Drupal Commerce project was just shy of two months ago. In that time I've had the pleasure of committing 50+ patches from 34 different contributors (including myself). Over half of the contributors to this release were first time contributors to the project, and together they helped us close out 25+ bug reports, bringing our active count down to a mere 26.

Can't wait to hit the mythical issue queue zero!

What's new in this release?

• The default Orders View now sorts by last update instead of order number, which was never a reliable sorting method given the way Drupal Commerce handles shopping carts.
• A Revisions tab to order pages, letting you see a tidy log of changes made to the order by the customer during the Add to Cart and Checkout processes and by administrators during processing:
  
• An improved payment method administration interface along with Order tokens that print out the title of the payment method used by a customer during checkout.
• A pluggable API function for determining the "default" product on a product display / Add to Cart form.
• A new option to limit the number of products shown in product reference widgets (rolling back the hard cap of 50 that Commerce 1.5 introduced).
• Performance improvements to product field injection (only injecting fields / inspecting field info when necessary) and to the Add to Cart form (reducing the amount of data in the form arguments that in turn get stored in the form cache).

Laudable bug fixes

• Changing the default appearance of the Orders View also finally fixes the "unfortunate" default sort that View has had, a textual numeric sort based on the Order Number (e.g. 3, 2, 10, 1).
• Thanks to peterpoe for the patch that allows radio button attribute field widgets to use HTML like their edit form counterparts.
• Thanks to KarenS for sticking with me in an overdue issue and pointing out the way to, get this, ensure we never install with missing fields again. That's a bold (well, "em"phasized) statement, but I'm happy to make it and be proven wrong. I really think we've nailed this longstanding issue. The masochists among us can now even disable and re-enable Drupal Commerce on the same site. I shaved a month off my life testing it.
• Thanks to merlinofchaos for a conversation some months ago that sparked the idea to add a new field handler for the Commerce Price field to fix price aggregation in Views. I've added one that renders aggregated price amounts without notices using a proper currency.

And of course thanks to everyone else who contributed back to make the project better for everyone. This release includes dozens of small fixes, API additions, and features that will improve the user and developer experience for many grateful people around the world.

Check out the release notes for the full change log, a quick description of two minor API changes developers might need to accommodate, and a link to the first minor patch I've committed to the new release (congrats for the first report, noelgross!).