eCommerce News & Resources by oscommerceuniversity.com

Well, here we are, the end of March. Busy month, this one. The site has been migrated to a new VPS which should offer significant improvements in performance over the previous shared hosting account.

In addition, we have added new software, including this blog and a new Wiki. This in response to two things. First, my discovery that Moodle’s blogging tool was particularly unfriendly about exposing content to the public. Second, we are launching some public development activities and looking at optimal tools to use for community based agile development. We will be posting design documents in the Wiki, and conducting discussion in the forums – a live exercise in Extreme Programming methodology which should benefit the community as a whole.

I’ve gotten quite a workout in templating during the past month or two. For various reasons I’ve templated installations of Account Lab Plus, WhoIS Cart and WHM Complete Solution as well as 3 CRE Loaded based sites. Not my favorite thing to do, or my strongest suite in the eCommerce department, but it has been a good learning experience. The notes resulting from the CRE Loaded templates is going into a Technical Report on ATS Template construction. They are rather rough at the moment, so it may take another month or so before I’m satisfied enough to release it publicly, but it is coming along. I still have several CRE Loaded sites to template, and intend to skin WordPress, SMF and Moodle before finishing this out. By the time I’m done, I’ll have the entire osCommerce University site re-themed around a common layout.

I’m also writing notes and collecting research materials on the components of Magento, a very impressive addition to the Open Source eCommerce field. Especially exciting is their inclusion of a Data Flow Management systems. FINALLY – a shopping cart project that understands the importance of being able to migrate data!

Written for PHP 5, using PDO MySQL and the Zend Framework, this is a different animal with an impressive list of features even though it is only in the 0.9 version. I am looking forward to taking this puppy out for a test drive.

Well, I took time this morning to do some rather overdue site updates.

After the recent CRE Loaded SQL Injection vulnerability report, the store was
updated pretty quickly. In the process, I noticed some omissions
in maintaining the store front in synch with the Moodle contents.
The new osCommerce installation course was not present, nor was
our new Cafe Press shop. Those are now linked.

RSS feeds are coming to the front page soon as well – with this
blog being fed to a mainpage module in order to improve
visibility and content density. This should help get more news to
more people..

There are some issues yet in CRE Loaded’s Content Director
System. Top level URL overrides don’t function as expected. This
has forced my link to this blog down to a secondary page.
Further, updates become a bit dicey if you don’t remember all the
original installation details. I’ll have to add this type thing
into the upcoming installation and upgrade checklist forms,
though that is a bit further down the timeline than the
templating tutorials…

I have continued to work on two templates over the past month or
so, as time between writing bouts allowed. The first one is a Web
2.0 “Amazon Style” template. This one has taken quite awhile
because it involves some Javascript, something I have not worked
with directly before. The process has been interesting, and I owe
Kiran a debt of gratitude for his help with the integration of
the floating menu script attached to the main navigation bar.
This project is a primarily commercial cooperative venture based
on the template at http://www.oscommerce-resources.com. We have a
bit of work left to do yet but the working code already includes
a few interesting points for those who follow template design for
CRE Loaded stores. The Javascript inclusion is moved mostly to
the bottom of the page. This should speed page rendering and
initial results tend to bear this out.

The second template will adorn osCommerce University – and form
the basis of a class in development of ATS templates. I’m hoping
also to have time to strip down the boxes.tpl.php classes, and
get some serious optimization on both of these packages – while
generating some useful Flash content and development tools as
part of the educational package.