OScommerce

Just a note here, I have given up on OScommerce. It is a good example of open source software at its worse, you can read my rant from several years ago, down below. Maybe things have changed, but my experience was so bad, I am not inclined to even investigate. If I go down this road again, I would look at a rails based scheme anyway, not a ratty wad of poorly maintained PHP code guarded by a paranoid and self serving group of developers.

This page holds my oscommerce resources. I have information, some handy stuff you can download, and some links.

OScommerce is a package written in PHP to set up an online store on your web server. The official resources are:

• The OScommerce web site
• The OScommerce forums
• OScommerce community contributions

The forums are especially helpful, since activity on the OScommerce site can only generously be said to take place at a glacial speed.

There are a lot of contributions, and they are quite frankly essential. The OScommerce development community has an "odd way of doing business", to put it charitably. The oscommerce package you download has well known major deficiencies which they never fix. You have to root around on the forums and get scolded for asking an obvious question such as: Do I really have to enable register globals to run this? I even had posts censored and removed from the forum when I included a URL to patches on my home page (bizarre, eh?). I have even coined a new term, which I now apply to this project: Bogus source. My anaysis is that the developer(s) is(are) control freaks who are no longer working on the project, but are unwilling to loose control of it. Rather than allowing the project to move forward, they are instead investing their energy in preventing others from doing so.
Hopefully I am wrong, but I don't think so.

The stuff I have here for download is as follows:

• the latest official tarball
• the latest PDF document
• The version 1.3 register globals patchfiles from Vger
• The version 1.4 register globals patch from Richard Bentley
• SVN access to my patched source tree

You can (and probably should) get the tarball and documentation from the official site, but you are welcome to what I have here. You should at least check the official site (maybe sometime in 2007 or so) to see if they come out with a new release.

My informational resources are:

• my experiences with the 2003 release
• my experiences with the 2005 release
• my .htaccess file tutorial
• my OScommerce FAQ