Saturday, March 07, 2009

Community Development Server Online

It has always been a goal to shift the paradigm from a small development team to a large, distributed, team.  Of course we have thought about coding standards, quality assurance, and security audits.  I am truly excited to announce the inevitable release of the Community Development Server to the public where they can peer review the code, download snapshots, and offer advice and/or code.

We plan on tying the forum member base into repository access routines so that if one were a forum member that person could potentially be a community contributor as well.

Stay tuned as we should have this completed in the next few days (or weeks at the maximum)!

Bobby

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

osCommerce is Dead, Long Live osCommerce

For anyone that has been active with the osCommerce project for a couple of years it is obvious that it is near abandonment.  There has been very little to no progress on the milestones and the MS3.x release is already a corpse.  It completely breaks backward compatibility with MS2.2 contributions which is the real strength of the project:  the shear number of community contributions.  Hence, MS3.x has lost the momentum of MS2.2 and is starting from scratch like the other shopping cart startups.

Luckily, there are some high functioning software engineers that will not let osCommerce die and have started The osCommerce Project.  This is not a fork of the project but rather is skipping the MS3 and heading straight for MS4 which will support PHPv5.2x natively.  In addition, the shopping cart will use an eCommerce framework that can be upgraded without having to reinstall contributions, plugins, modules, or themes. 

We have a dedicated development server (a Quad core demon) with a SourceForge clone installed.  It natively supports CVS and also Subversion.  We are using this development server for the core framework and also the shopping cart that will be built on top of the framework.

Another upside is the version control of community contributions.  Yes, we are opening the development server to any developer that is familiar with CVS or Subversion.  The biggest drawback to creating osCommerce contributions is that there is no version or quality control which makes it hard to support especially when there are more unstable than stable forks.

At any rate, stop by the osCommerce Discussion Forum and read up.  I'll see you there!