eCommerce News & Resources by oscommerceuniversity.com

Our latest video, CRE Loaded Manual Order Creator retails for only $15.00 USD and includes up to 6 minutes of live animation slides with voice narrative on every aspect of creating a manual order within CRE Loaded 6.2.13.1 Standard, Pro & B2B. For more details, click the link below.

• Lesson 1
  • Payment Method Configuration
  • Shipping Method Configuration
  • New Customers
  • Existing Customers
• Lesson 2
  • Quickly search and use existing customers
  • Enter new customers
  • Customer IDs
  • Using the drop down selectors
• Lesson 3
  • Selecting a category
  • Selecting a product
  • Assigning attributes
• Lesson 4
  • Adding Tax
  • Adding Shipping Method and price
  • Selecting Payment Method
  • Adding Discount
  • Adding Comments
• Lesson 5
  • Updating your order
  • Printing Invoices
  • Printing Packing Slips

More Info: CRE Loaded Admin Manual Order Entry

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.

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.

Read more

2008-11-23

We are finally resuming the development of educational materials here at our nascent Open Source eCommerce University. A new Flash tutorial on updating prices and quantity with Easy Populate is in rough draft, along with a written guide. Its not before time. Its been months since we released anything new in the Moodle installation – but it is getting a face lift, with a new theme to match the rest of the site and new content to match. We will be trying some new arrangements for our classes, and bringing live chat to the table in the near future for those who wish to meet vendors versed in CRE Loaded, osCommerce and other packages serving the Open Source ecommerce marketplace.

Look for a first release of this tutorial in 2 to 3 weeks max.

by David Graham.

Wow.

I’ve now finished generating the screen captures for installations
of CRE Loaded 6.2 B2B, osC Max 2.0.0 rc3.01, and osCommerce 2.2 rc1.

Zen Cart is coming up, but already some interesting differences can
be seen. Each distribution starts to show its varying emphasis
right away.

The osC Max installer bears a very close resemblence to the old
osCommerce 2.2 MS2 installer. Not surprising, as the osC Max
project emphasizes its position as a preinstaller of contributions
which makes no effort to innovate on its own. osC Max installs and
generates bug fixes, but improvements are the province of the
osCommerce projects developers and contributors.

The CRE Loaded installers bears some resemblence to its descendents
as well, at least in the essential steps. It has a clean rebranded
look, though a bit aged in appearance when compared to the
osCommerce 2.2 rc1 installer. The added features definitely stand
out. This installer easily has the most comprehensive checks for
server compatibility and file and directory permissions. It also
shows a level of maturity greater than either of the other
installers where security features are involved. Password echoing
is held to a minimum for example, and the CRE installer retains the
seemingly redundant but definitely helpful capability to use
separate database users for installation and store
operations.

The osCommerce 2.2 rc1 installer is a substantial back port of the
osCommerce 3.0 Alpha installer. While the implementation is
definitely both prettier and flashier than its 2.2 MS2 predecessor,
it falls short in some respects. Particularly, I could not fathom
why AJAX techniques were used for some status reports. The rapid
updates were too quick for the human eye, and the advance to the
next page left me wondering just what had been reported on. Not
good.

However, the rc1 installer does show some promise. It does include
a few server compatibility checks on the front page. These are
likely sufficient given a development targeted at the lowest common
denominator in server setup. There were no file or permission
checks present. This could be problematical, and indeed, I noticed
immediately after completing the installation that the backup tool
was non-functional due to the lack of an admin/backups
directory.

On the promising side though, this was the shortest installation
procedure of the three. The instructions were clear, if not quite
complete, and the direction in which development is proceeding is
quite satisfying. The osCommerce project definitely is nowhere near being out of the game.

I’m definitely looking forward to seeing the direction taken by Zen
Cart, the outspoken fork which seeks to dominate them all..