eCommerce News & Resources by oscommerceuniversity.com

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.

Pursuant to my post earlier this month (“A River Runs Through It”), much progress has been made. We are now high and dry with new carpet and complete repairs to the damaged areas of the house.

While getting all this done has taken some time, some surprising progress has been made in advancing professional content – if sometimes indirectly.

First, work has begun on my technical report on ATS templating for CRE Loaded. This already includes 160+ pages of content and appears to be turning into Inside CRE Loaded: Volume 2.

Next, having acquired a partner, Denver Prophit to operate Hosting-4-creloaded.com on behalf of StrikeHawk Hosting, we have added a developer to our staff who will be working with us to develop consistently maintained professional documentation of osCommerce based releases. This is a welcome addition and we look forward to gaining momentum on generation of content and therefore courses.

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I’ve been subjected to a bit of distraction lately. The office has been sinking.

Well, not literally sinking, you understand, but definitely moist. It began about a month ago when my better half noticed moisture in the carpet. A lot of moisture.

This drew our attention. It was surrounding a book case so we scurried to save the contents, move the furniture and begin the diagnostic process. The water was clear, which thankfully let out sewer blockage as a potential cause. Unfortunately, we were unable to immediately rule out groundwater leakage, a broken water pipe or act of God.

It happened on a weekend of course, immediately after the complex staff left for the day. The remainder of the weekend was spent soaking hydrogen dioxide from the rug, and hoping for a cessation in the persistent precipitation. Ok, constant rain, damn it. It took three days to get a thorough examination finished. This involved partially demolishing a wall, revealing one small hole in a pipe. It had to be the main fresh water inlet for the entire building and it was. By this time, the water was starting to rise – and primary line or not, I was doubtful that the small leak we had located was sufficient to account for the amount of water soaking the floor of the center of our connubial bliss. A plumber was summoned, but by this time another weekend had arrived, and of course they were unable to locate the cut off valve for the building. This ran to another 3 days of delay while they arranged first to locate said cut off valve, determine it was nonfunctional and arrange to turn off the water for the entire complex. This to repair a leak less than an sixteenth of an inch in diameter in a two inch pipe. Oh joy.

We were advised not to expect immediate relief from our inundation (Latin inundatus, past participle of inundare, see water) - it was expected that water would continue to seep from soaked dry wall for another (you guessed it), three days. This though the dry wall itself was largely, well – dry. I informed our plumber and the maintenance supervisor that I doubted this strongly based on my extensive experience in nursing urological disorders in a tone that was dry if not rye.

Three days later, the river still ran. In fact, it ran rather more strongly than before. Again, I visited the maintenance supervisor and issued him a situation advisory. Once more he inspected the source of our fountain and again, dry wall suffered the indignant abuse necessary to fully expose the source of the flow. While moisture was visible, and the presence of the leak was clear, the source remained elusive A consultant was called in – and the culprit finally localized. It was beneath the concrete. More calls to plumbers, and bids solicited. Not good news. In this southern town, obtaining a bid alone can take 15 to 30 days. Still, not all news was bad. The persistent nature of the issue finally drew the attention of the complex manager, who revealed to her new maintenance supervisor the availability of a carpet extractor and blowers. The situation began to improve.

So, as I write this entry I am listening to the tune of a high speed blower which attempts in vain to dry my soaked floor coverings and contemplating just how much I have accomplished in the past month despite my frequent towel soaking and spinning evolutions and contemplating search engine optimization. Why? One of my better events of the past month was getting to chat with Pitstop (Darel), a denizen of the CRE Loaded forums with a significant interest in SEO techniques and a number of opinions which closely match my own. We have begun a series of posts in the universities forums to address this topic, and will be referring to this entry from time to time to point out some important SEO do’s and don’ts.

Check the forum link CRE Loaded Hints and Tips section for more SEO commentary from both Daren and myself, and have a dry day.