OSCommerce

Free ecommerce software OSCommerce is the granddaddy of Open Source online shop e-commerce solutions. It is powered by a dedicated, strong, and ever growing community, and is freely available under the GNU General Public License. There are currently over 12000 live shops worldwide powered by osCommerce.

OSCommerce is included in several web hosting packages. This means it can easily installed on your website with the click of a button.

OSCommerce combines open source solutions to provide a free and open e-commerce platform, which includes the powerful PHP web scripting language, the stable Apache web server, and the fast MySQL database server.

With no restrictions or special requirements, OSCommerce is able to run on any PHP enabled web server, on any environment that PHP and MySQL supports, which includes Linux, Solaris, BSD, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows environments.

All the web pages are created dynamically from the MySQL database and the design templates on the web server.

OS Commerce does not require any software to be installed on your own computer – the entire administration of your shop is carried out via your normal web browser, by logging on to the admin section of the website.

Extending OSCommerce

Over 5,700 add-on modules have been produced by developers all over the world to add extra functionality – extra payment service providers, business to business ecommerce functions, group discounts, etc.

This shows both the strengths and weaknesses of this type of software. If a particular feature that you need to implement is not present in the standard version, the chances are that someone, somewhere has written a “contribution” that does just what you require. However, because these are written by different people at different times, they may not necessarily work with other contributions that you may have installed to provide some other feature.

Installing OSCommerce contributions

Installing contributions is not always straight forward either. Installing one contribution on a fresh copy of osCommerce is usually just a matter of uploading the new files provided to your web server. In most cases, these will replace some of the existing files with new versions.

When you come to install another contribution to your now modified version, things become more difficult. You cannot just upload the new files provided by the contribution as they will again overwrite the existing files on the server, which will undo some, but not all of the changes made by the first contribution. Result – a broken website.

In many cases you will need to copy and paste the new bits of code from the contribution files to your existing files. This can be a major operation, as in some cases there may be over 100 files that need to be changed or added. You need to be fairly comfortable with editing PHP files in order to do this successfully.

OSCommerce Loaded Versions

Due to the these difficulties, a number of “loaded” distributions have been made available by different people. These have various important or popular contributions ready installed and configured so that they work together. Popular loaded distributions include CRE Loaded and OSCMax.

Open Source Shopping Cart

OSCommerce was started in March 2000, so it has been around for a considerable time. It seems to have been stuck at version 2.2 for most of that time with little or no core development taking place. However, in recent months, work on the long-promised version 3 seems to have re-started.

Because osCommerce is open source, developers are able to use  and modify the code to produce a new product. There are also a number of shopping carts which have used OSCommerce as a basis for a new cart; the best known of these is ZenCart, another new cart which looks promising is Batavi

These all try to make the software more usable by ordinary shop keepers, rather than just by the hard-core types.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 1:53 pm and is filed under Free Ecommerce Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.