osCommerce 3 Alpha
It's been almost a year since we did an interview with Harald Ponce De Leon of the osCommerce project in which he talked about the new version of osCommerce coming out very soon. That turned out not to be true, I suspect because of some changes in the team over there, and also because the new version will be a large step forward.
For those that are not familiar with osCommerce, it is an open-source shopping cart solution that is intensely popular and boasts a huge community of users and supporting developers. Not only that, since it is open source there are a ton of "contributions" which can extend the functionality to do nearly anything that one can imagine. I personally really like osCommerce, although it can be a bit robust for some needs. In addition, it has fallen behind in terms of development, until now.
I downloaded the most recent alpha version of osCommerce 3 the other night, which is still under development and available for testing and preview purposes. I have to say that I can understand why the update is taking so long, and I also really am impressed with some of the ideas that they are trying to put forth. But let's start at the beginning since I have only had a little time to play with it. I expect to post more in the future, but here's what I have to say at first glance.
First, the CSS based layout is much better than the old system. While there are still a lot of template files that need to be edited in order to customize it, I actually prefer that. Using CSS designers can make global changes pretty easily, and the ability to get at template files for each little part of the site is appealing to me as a developer. The templating system is easy to understand, and I think that there are pleny of options with regard to functionality that people should have no problem finding what they need. Not only that, but the boxes can be moved around the site via the admin (from left column to right column), and the administrator has a very high level of control over much of the store configuration. Moreso than I have seen in other shopping cart systems that I have used.
On the subject of the admin, I would say that it is greatly improved. As always there is great error reporting and a fantastic new navigation menu in the admin. There are also a list of available admin services, such as a setting for search engine friendly URLs (which didn't work too smoothly for me) and other advantageous configurations. Plenty of advanced support for sales taxes, shipping and more. I especially like the options for custom validation for each credit card, and the ease with which you could choose available payment methods. This thing has a lot of potential, and it's obvious that Harald and the osC team have really listened to the feedback that they have received.
The installation process was extremely efficient and easy-to-use. I have to say that I was really impressed with the interface for installation. Since it's an alpha version there were no real installation instructions, but I expect that will change in the future.
Of course, this is just a testing alpha version of the store. And hopefully they are planning to do a LOT of work to it before releasing a beta and then a stable version. I say this because there were some obvious deficiencies still that would prevent this from becoming a universal, reliable application. First of all, the search engine friendly URLs option did not reliably work when I turned it on and off. It should be a simple matter of writing to an .htaccess file, as I could see the URL scheme that they are going for. I like it, and it will be a great improvement if they can get that to work. All that I think will be needed is a reliable mechanism to write to the .htaccess file when the module is turned on and off. That doesn't appear to be the case now, and I had to write my own .htaccess rewrite rules to get their SEF URL module to work.
In addition, I would like to see how Contributions will be added. One boast of the new version is that contributions will be added via the admin interface, rather than having to be put in the code by a developer. This would be a great step forward, and I am looking forward to seeing how this will work. While not quite there yet, osCommerce is a sleeping giant in the shopping cart world. I believe that if they can get version 3 wrapped up and made stable, it will be a real force for years to come in the shopping cart software. Just as version 2 has been for the last few years.
I encourage anyone else that has played with osCommerce 3 alpha to post a comment describing what you thought of it and what your experiences are. And don't forget to support Harald and the entire osCommerce Team. They deserve it.
