eCommerce News & Resources by oscommerceuniversity.com

It has been rather a tradition to end one year by reviewing its events and offering an overview of our hopes for the new year.  This year is no different.  Looking back at 2008  osCommerce University has had  a rather bumpy ride - but for the most part our results have been positive.   While traffic can't yet be reliably quantified for 2008, during the year we have  increased Google Analytics tracking to cover the entire site - 2009 should see much improved visibility into site usage.   For 2008, the increase of forum usage to over 50 users and 850 posts are clear indications that the site is becoming more popular and more useful.

This despite our loss of educational content to a Moodle sadly rocked by security vulnerabilities - and our only security violation thus far.  While this remains a substantial improvement over the early days of my involvement with the CRE Loaded forums (frequently tagged with injected alterations during its PHPNuke phase), we're commited to improving this record during 2009.   Moodle has been kept up to date, and with no further issues we are proceeding to recover the mangled content, and to develop new tutorial material.

Our CRE Loaded Installation tutorials have been maintained up to CRE Loaded version 6.2.13.   We plan to add a CRE Loaded 6.3 version soon.  Development of tutorials on CRE Loaded Order Creator and CRE Loaded Easy Populate usage are now in progress.   Updates of our Zen Cart and osC Max installation tutorials will also be done, once current work is complete.

The Easy Populate and Order Creator video work will see serious work this year, as the core of our first commercialized workshops.  We will hold those within  6 weeks.

2008 saw the development of several partnerships which will start to blossom in early 2009.   Contribution Central software products will be available in the sites book store soon and the addition of  CC's owner, Gerald Bullard to the EOS development community is most welcome.   Kerry Watson joins the forum staff as the moderator of our Prestashop forums, as well as working with us to develop general ecommerce educational content.  Laura Wheeler, of Firelight Web Studios will be managing and constructing our new EOS Online Merchant site.  We're very happy not only to have someone else taking on the site construction (our existing infrastructure is a hefty burden already!), but to have this knowledgable and forthright ecommerce practicitioner as a core member of our community.    Firm opinons, clearly voiced are one of our most valuable assets.

EOS Online Merchant development has been steady during 2008, and will no doubt see more visibility during 2009.  During the past 2 months, work has been underway to expand the carts multi-media capabilities.  EOS now includes Gallery functionality and can support products with a wide range of  video and audio content.   StrikeHawk eCommerce will  also be back porting this capability to CRE Loaded as a major commercial add on.  It has been long requested, and we are excited about the possibilities this will open up for CRE loaded users during the coming year.

StrikeHawk eCommerce also had a busy year.  With strong growth in customer base during the last quarter of the year, the Site  Operations Management program is shaping up to be a powerful service offering for etailers commited to leveraging Open Source software in their operations.  The release of their Web Masters tools has added a very useful set of tools to the CRE Loaded arsenal, overlooked as it has been due to the inclusion of Google Analytics capability in the 6.3 release.  It will receive a number of updates in 2009 and be released in a 6.3 based version as well.    The addition of  support for other analytic services should see this package enjoy strong sales growth in the coming year.

I could go on in greater length - but its time to get back to generating more solutions for clients, and building our educational offerings.   We're committed to realizing our potential as an educational platform for Open Source ecommerce in 2009, and its time to get back to work.  See you around!

Recently, Rhea Anthony, widely known to long time osCommerce users as Vger and a former member of Harald Ponce de Leon's osCommerce development team launched a bid to assume control of the osCommerce code base and community.  She and a number of other major contributors to osCommerce have relocated their oscanswers.com forum to a new domain - http://www.oscommerceproject.org , and releasing a distribution based on the most recent osCommerce release 2.2 RC2B which they are calling osCommerce 2.0 Final.

That community members involved as long as this team can't recall that the current osCommerce 2.2 development work was preceded by an osCommerce 2.1 release is a clear indicator of the necessity of this action if osCommerce is to survive as a project at all.  8+ years between releases is entirely too long.

In her first blog post as osCommerce Project leader,  Rhea tells a bit about herself and comments on the reasons for this drastic action.  If you have any interest in osCommerce at all, I strongly encourage you to read this post.  It is an interesting description of one view of the osCommerce community from a member who has been persistent and energetic in contributing to others.  But, it is one view.

The term "believer" has been a very powerful term in the osCommerce world in both positive and negative ways.  I can easily sympathize with Rhea's obvious disappointment at the disdain directed towards community members who claimed to be or were described as believers.  Having been among those who were disparaged by groups of "osCommerce beleivers"  because my own beliefs differed from their own, I also understand the disparagement.  We all beleive in something.  But some community members have and do beleive that the rest of us should beleive what they do and nothing more.

This lack of tolerance from and courtesy towards others is a deadly poison for any community.  The cure begins with leadership.  So, it is an encouraging step that Rhea has made the effort to establish regular communications via her blog early in the process of transforming the oscanswers forum into the oscommerce project site.  Keep it up, Rhea.  I can't say I'm a great blogger either.  But I can say it does get easier with time.  Along the way, I hope to see  you create a more open and accepting osCommerce community.  Towards that end, here are a few suggestions:

1. Don't settle for a development team.  Build a development community whose activities are open to all.  When viewpoints differ, establish working groups to represent those viewpoints with code that can prove or disprove their theories.  This is the one of the most powerful uses of branches.  They feed the tree, they don't starve it.
2. Build a documentation group.  Insist on performance from them, and cooperation with them so that technical documentation is available to all.  You can't build consensus without it.
3. Open the community to discussion of related projects in some way.  No project can benefit from code comparison and evaluation when the discussions are splintered across dozens of forums.  At the very least, branches should be able to post links and route discussion accordingly.
4. While disparagement and exclusion of community members should be avoided like the plague, the same can not be said of code contributions.  Once API documentation is published, contributions which fail to comply with coding standards should be ruthlessly separated from the rest or even deleted.  Establishing separate management of experimental API code is essential.
5. Open development discussions.  Smoke filled rooms are great for monopolists.  They have no place in Open Source.  So what if crackers can see your plans.  It is not like they can't read your code.  Keep your code discussion lively and take some time to explain things.   Knowledge is power, but its like manure - its got to be spread to be effective.

At this early stage, it is hard to see much difference between this new osCommerce Project and the old one. Time will tell, and I'm sure the differences Rhea mentioned will become apparent soon.  The sooner, the better.

It is good to see new osCommerce releases, and active development.  As one old Democrat to another, I'm happy to bid the new osCommerce Project welcome to the open source ecommerce community.

Open Source eCommerce platforms and bootstapping go together like salt and pepper, ham and eggs or turkey and dressing. That's a fact.

Even when the software is commercialized, it offers significant advantages to the bootstrapping firm in the form of the implicit opportunity to craft new capabilities over time as funding allows.  Which is why I take this opportunity to reply to Javier Rojas description of bootstrapping, a  process in which founders self finance their way to profitability in his article "The Art of the Bootstrap" at venturebeat.com.

In an unpublished article I started on October 15, I stated "Kerry Watson's new article was posted today on ecommerceguide.com. You can find it at: http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/news/news/article.php/3777841 . It is entitled, "Can Iozzia Get the CRE Loaded Love Back?". The short answer is no."

While I still think I blew off a bit more steam than I want to publicize so quickly after Chain Reaction's devastating implosion (or indeed - at all), events since then have made me reconsider addressing the issue in this venue though not the conclusion of my initial paragraph.  First off was the management of the all too expected eruption of steam following Sal's "grand return" and the unbanning of a number of long time community members who were neither happy at being banned, or impressed with claims of change.  One of the most vociferous was Michael DesMarais of Supreme Center Hosting .

I was reading an article entitled, "The Cutting Edge of Trade Secrets--How Far Should the Law Go To Prevent Misappropriation by Memory and Inevitable Disclosure" and what I found relevant to most small business computer networks are that employees often can setup email accounts and store emails on their personal home computer should the telecommuter - work at home.

But is it? There seems plenty of reason to doubt whether the approach is either new or open source. My original concept when proposing CRE Loaded commercialization was to charge a standard fee per copy distributed with a 30 to 90 day support window, following which support could be obtained on a contract basis. Revenues would be further augmented by internally developed documentation and education offerings made available both directly to the public on Chain Reaction's own site, and via a distribution network of existing community vendors. The value of the software would be increased by ongoing addition of new features designed and built in house, and refactoring of the core code to bring it into alignment with the current PHP and MySQL feature sets and changes in the security environment.

What has emerged appears to be little more than SaaS without the second S. Here is why.

The "manual" posted on the latest incarnation of their website is a thinly disguised knock off of Kerry Watson's 6.2 Users Manual. They may argue that there are few other ways to state the programs use, and that just may be. But why can't the 'designers' of the software do any better? They should for example, have access to and include information on input formats and boundaries, and systemic capabilities and limitations which are not readily available to the non-programmer. Such information is not, as of the date of this writing, available in their "users guide". Their "educational program" consists of a page buried 3-5 levels deep in their site which asks the users to inform Chain Reaction of their educational needs so that content can be developed. So much for educational and documentation support.

Their new releases are "subscription" based. But there is some room for question as to just what users would be subscribing. What does Chain Reaction deliver in return for its charges?