eCommerce News & Resources by oscommerceuniversity.com

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.

Well, it has been awhile since I posted here, and a progress report is way
overdue, so here goes.

First, I’ve completed our first FLASH tutorial on CRE Loaded. This
movie covers installation, and will be followed within a week on
equivalent material covering osC Max (60% done), Zen Cart and
osCommerce (each about 10% complete).

WINK has been a real blessing. This free Open Source Flash tutorial
creator (found at http://debugmode.com) manages screen captures in
a variety of ways which make capturing tutorials a relatively quick
and easy task. Additional tasks such as affects for video markup
are a bit more involved, but the package is definitely well worth
investigation!

I have a pretty good sized number of tutorials to create before I
can launch a full course, but I expect to be able to move more
quickly as I get the first dozen or so created.

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..