Contribution VS a Feature

[David M. Graham]

Well stated.

Another issue with osCommerce based code is the ongoing and solid separation between developers.  It is ok to tell someone that if you don't like the way its done, recode it yourself and offer it as a contribution.  It is not ok to split development efforts into a thousand fragments when basic functionality is lacking, and could benefit from a collaborative effort directed towards standard business practices.

osCommerce encourages the thought that unless you can code, you can not contribute.  This is far from the truth.  Programming is a major form of contribution, but far from the only one.  Designing and testing the software are equally important, and every member of the community has something to bring to the table there.

These are reasons why we conduct planning operations publicly.  Whether you are a shop operator, web service provider or programmer, participating in planning offers an opportunity to contribute that is vastly more powerful than the "whoops, here's some code" approach taken by osCommerce itself.

One of the biggest osCommerce flaws derives from the failure to document the underlying framework and API features and to encourage programmers to follow them.  As we refactor code, we should be building documentation of programming standards, the framework and API's.  This can allow vendors using EOS to produce code which is less likely to be incompatible with either the core code or code produced by others.  This should be a good thing for the average user.

[zip1]

With EOS we don't think of things as contributions to be added to the cart. We think of things as Feature Sets with individual Features.  This help use from getting locked into using to much code that may not work well in php 5 or does not work with the EOS API.

Most contribution available for any OSC clones are written to sort of an OSC standard. The problem is that OSC was written for php 3.  This can create a lot of problems because when you work with the code you have a tendency to get code snippets from the contribution.

Using php 3 code on a server that has php5 will create a lot of bugs.

Another reason behind calling things Feature sets is that by the time the code is converted from php3 to php5 code there are a lot better techniques to use and the features a Features set has does not match up very well with a similar contribution.