This is the second in a series on osCommerce, the popular free, open-source shopping cart alternative, and the industry it has spawned.

Open Source shopping carts have been around for the last decade. A "shopping cart" is typically a program that makes it easy for you to create an online store with pictures of your products, and accept credit card payments that are automatically deposited into your bank account. "Open Source" means these programs are free to use and free to modify. The free price tag makes them very popular, and has spurred the creation of thousands of modifications. These modifications are typically donated back to the community of the original program for free use by anyone else using that cart, creating a vast pool of available resources.

While there were a few early open source shopping carts written in CGI in the 1990's, the creation of the open source language PHP in the late 1990's led to a creative explosion of open source shopping carts. PHP allowed the browser to interact with a database — such as a products database — in ways that were previously not possible. In this column we'll take a look at a few of these open source shopping carts to see where they came from, where they are today, and where the industry is going.

osCommerce: The Grand-Daddy of Open Source PHP Shopping Carts

The still-promised osCommerce MS3 "Liebkuchen" private Admin's colorful drop-down menus. (Click for larger image)

osCommerce was one of the first open source shopping cart programs to take advantage of the PHP language. It was first released in March 2000 as "The Exchange Project" with project leader Harald Ponce de Leon of Germany at the helm. According to the group's first website, the development team had the grand ambition to "prove that open source works."

In 2002, The Exchange Project changed their name to osCommerce and released their Milestone (MS) 2.2 version, which has been "generally considered to be stable." The Milestone designation was supposed to refer to the beta, or "not-quite-ready-for-prime-time" status, but as the years wore on the public embraced osCommerce as a de facto public release and built thousands of live ecommerce stores with it. Its features were advanced and revolutionary for its time, but the program is now considered basic today unless it is customized.

Six years later, with the version released in July of 2007, the group finally dropped the beta Milestone designation, changing the name to "osCommerce Online Merchant." The world had changed around it, forcing it to adapt repeatedly to new versions of the database program My SQL as well as several new versions of the PHP programming language. Rather than publicly advancing the development of the upcoming 3.0 release so it can march towards a release date, the group spent the remainder of 2007 behind the scenes, focused on making its upcoming version compatible with the current version of PHP, version 5.2.

The 2007 Preview Release of osCommerce MS3, dubbed "Liebkuchen" or "Love cake" (a gift of love) by the team, finds a shopping cart very similar to the osCommerce the world knows and loves, but with a private Admin for the store owner that has colorful, drop-down top navigation menus (screenshot). Many changes are internal to the coding, and will not affect the average store owner.

Young Upstarts Abound
Several other open source shopping cart programs became popular, thanks to the long and slow path forged by osCommerce. Whether a program branch of the original project –meaning the program is actually based on and contains the original program – or program fork – meaning the program is written anew using the knowledge and/or code from the original software, resulting in a distinct piece of new software. The open source license used by most of these programs explicitly permits the development of both kinds of new programs.

"Ian's Loaded"
The first program to branch from osCommerce was "Ian's Loaded, Version 1" by Ian C. Wilson, an early member of the osCommerce community listed as member number seven on the osCommerce forum's rolls. Ian's loaded began in late 2000 as osCommerce Milestone 1 with twenty additional contributions installed, many of them written by Wilson.

When the second, extensively-rewritten version of osCommerce, was released in 2002, osCommerce Milestone 2.0, the Ian's Loaded team divided into two camps. One of the camps wanted to remain an official branch project in the osCommerce family, starting fresh with the new MS2, and inserting the now twenty-three contributions. Remaining a branch of the OSC family allows users to continue to use existing contributions to modify their own copy of the program.

The other camp, headed by Wilson, wanted to start with completely fresh code, keeping much of the look and feel of osCommerce but creating a forked project. That project would later become Zen Cart.

The Ian's Loaded remained in the osCommerce family, becoming CRE Loaded (more on that later on), and Wilson left his namesake project behind.

Ian's Detour
Rather than going directly to Zen Cart, however, Wilson officially joined the osCommerce team in February of 2003, along with Linda McGrath and several other new developers. The venerable Wilson was involved in osCommerce early on, and is credited with creating and donating many original contributions such as the gift voucher system, a voting program called pollbooth, and customer-specific discount percentage, among many others. McGrath, also an early member as osCommerce forum member number twelve, was responsible for creating and donating many original contributions as well, including attribute sorter copier, download controller, down for maintenance, GZip adaption, quantity controller, free call for price, price by attributes & showroom.

This was the second development team to work on osCommerce, and the team was never able to fully come together. Though the team did manage to finish and release osCommerce Milestone 2.2.2 only five months later in July of 2003, dissent was brewing with some members of the new programming team over the way the program was put together, calling it a "complicated programming exercise" and that the Table-Tag-Soup and evil FONT tags that are "so last century."

Zen Cart is Born
Even before the release of osCommerce MS2.2.2, in June 2003 the new domain name Zen-Cart.com had been registered. A team was put together comprised of Ian C Wilson, Kim Elliott, Steve Strassburg and Linda McGrath, and the first Zen-Cart.com Web site was posted in November 2003.

Besides streamlining the programming and utilizing CSS (cascading stylesheets) rather than the evil and outdated font tags, the Zen Cart team's philosophy was to make it easy to upgrade the store, and to offer frequent, small updates.

The Zen Cart team released its version 1.3.8 on November 30 of 2007. The group has announced that by February 5, 2008, the minimum supported PHP version will be the current version, PHP 5.2.

Today Wilson says the group created an umbrella company in March, 2007 which is exploring the possibility of financing the Zen-Cart open source e-commerce system, called Zen Ventures LLC. If the group is successful at obtaining financing, some method of earning revenues would necessarily have to follow, whether by selling the product or offering a hosted solution, training, documentation or other means. (Editor's Note: Kim Elliott responded to this supposition with the following statement: "How we decide to generate revenue is none of your business. But, the above gives our users the impression we might take the program commercial. That will not happen.)

"osCommerce, but Maximized"
OSC-Max actually began somewhat inauspiciously as the osCommerce documentation project located at oscdox.com. In the summer of 2002, concern over the lack of quality project documentation led to the founding of the osCDox project. Melinda Odom, a member of the osCommerce Team from the very first team list, and Michael Sasek, an osCommerce community member since 2002, began drafting a guide to installing osCommerce and making cosmetic and functional changes. Sasek filed for the domain name oscdox.com on June 18, 2002, and by July of the same year, version 0.5 of the draft manual became available on the Web site.

The guide was never completed and quickly became obsolete as the osCommerce program continued to change. However, the discussion forums on the osCDox.com website quickly became popular because unlike the official osCommerce forum, they welcomed open discussion of all forms of osCommerce.

On the side, Sasek and a few others pieced together a version of osCommerce that contained the contribution Simple Template System (STS) along with a couple dozen other popular contributions, dubbing it "osCommerce MAX." He quickly met resistance from Ponce de Leon, so changed the name to "OSC-MAX."

The Web site oscdox.com had originally been planned as a documentation site only, not as competition or a branch of the original project. By February 2003, Odom had been removed from the rolls of the osCommerce Team list. Sasek had built up momentum for his program though, purchasing the domain name oscmax.com in November of 2003. Odom left the osC-Dox documentation project and was later reinstated to the osCommerce Team in December 2003, and in Spring of 2004 was named Documentation Manager and placed over a new Knowledgebase project, where Odom remains to this day.

Through his hosting firm, aabox.com, in 2003 Sasek began offering for sale a pre-installed, hosted version of osC-MAX — then dubbed "MS2-MAX v.1.5." By June of 2004 Sasek was calling it the "free, custom build of osCommerce, OSCmax v1.7." Today the program is dubbed "osCommerce, with teeth" and is up to version 2.0 (RC3). The program can be downloaded for free by members who register on the Web site, and the hosted version is available on Sasek's hosting Web site, aabox.com, for a monthly fee of $12.99.