By Kerry Watson
November 25, 2008
Initially Anthony tried to negotiate for control of oscommerce.org for the new project, or even to purchase it outright. Jan Wildeboer, a long-standing member of the team since March of 2002, agreed to consider it after seeing the moribund forums, but would not decide until having talked to founder Ponce de Leon. Several weeks passed without further contact, and Anthony went ahead with the plan to 'fork' the whole project. She found a corporate sponsor to provide a dedicated server for the project at unitedhosting.com, purchased the oscommerceproject.org domain and merged her original forum with the new website and began the rebranding.
After the five-month hiatus, Ponce de Leon then re-appeared on his own forum in early November to update the board software to prevent porn images in posts. He called a Team Meeting which three people (including himself) attended. He then issued a statement that he was working on a final MS2 version and on v3 — but he'd done that before so no one was impressed. He deleted all critical posts, and then disappeared again.
Two weeks ago Frank Heinen, the only other Development Team member of the old project, resigned and is reportedly building his own fork of osCommerce with his own team. Harald then fired Wendy James from the Team. If not for Jan Zongee the old forums would be unmoderated.
Although the group is still in its first few weeks, they already have an active online forum. The group has just installed the Download software necessary for Core Downloads and Add-Ons. They have available an updated version of osCommerce titled RC2b and within the next week will have online and available for download osCommerce v2.0 Final — thus ending the long running saga of the MS2 stream.
The NEW osCommerce version RC2b compared to the old osCommerce RC2a:
- Ultimate SEO URLs are pre-installed, but not activated.
- Showcase is pre-installed (allows you to select which products go on your homepage).
- Up to date spiders.txt file.
- Up to date tld.txt file.
- Various minor changes to the default configuration.
- The old and outdated (and dangerous to use) osCommerce Credit Card module removed.
- Pay Offline iPro (UK only) payment module added.
- A minor change to the install procedure to stop "Headers already sent" errors when white space is added to the end of the two configure.php files.
- The UK
Currency has been added to the install.
- The PHP 3 compatibility coding has been stripped out.
- The No Chex and World Pay modules, both of which are old, outdated, and can be spoofed have been removed.
- A new Docs folder with advice files added.
- Tested on PHP 5 and MySQL 5.
- RC2a contains an outdated, non-functional, USPS shipping Module. This has been replaced with a working USPS module in RC2b.
- Splitting the English language between US English and UK English, each with their own currency (USD and GBP).
- Making the Shop Front HTML 4 transitional W3C compliant. Making osCommerce XHTML Strict compliant will be for v3.
This work has now all been done and the group is testing it before releasing it as v2.0 (Final).
The group is also already working on completing MS3 Alpha 4 to bring it to a final v3.0 release. The group is rewriting the Product Attributes system in the Alpha 4 version because it is buggy and not up to today's standards. Once that is done, the group plans to add a Manual Order Module to the back-end to allow site owners to set up new customers and process payments from their admin panel and then release the final v3.0.
Long live the new osCommerce!
Kerry Watson is a regular contributor to Ecommerce Guide, as well as a consultant and author of 12 books in the OSC industry. Her Web site is osCommerceManuals.com.
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