What is osCommerce: history, developers, perspectives

What is osCommerce? It is an open source platform on which to build an online store. It was developed by the programmer Harald Ponce de Leon, who did not even imagine that his small experiment would turn into a large international project. The programmer conducted research that proved that it is possible to make purchases using a digital shopping cart. In 2000, a small team of followers began to form.

The first name for an e-commerce platform was Exchange Project. However, the developers wanted the title to indicate that the project was open source. So the project was named osCommerce (os - open source). According to the team members, from the moment the name was changed, everyone began to understand that this was the beginning of a large-scale startup.

The platform has had many releases with a name change, here are some of them: The Exchange Project Preview Release, osCommerce 2.2 Milestone, osCommerce Online Merchant.

Difficulties on the path of development

On the way of development, each project faces serious difficulties, especially projects of a global scale. In the case of web products, this can be the creation of more modern analogs, detection of vulnerabilities, and imperfections in the system. On the "life path" of osCommerce, serious difficulties also appeared, for example, the emergence of competitors with more progressive solutions, a sharp decline in popularity, hacker attacks due to the same open source code. In 2011, malicious codes were added to the CMS code, which “infected” about 4.5 million web pages in 7 days. In the autumn of the same year, the engine's vulnerability was eliminated. Despite all the setbacks, the dedicated team continued to believe in the idea of ​​a perfect online store platform and worked on all the weaknesses of the CMS. One of the weaknesses of osCommerce was themes and templates, they were not modern, but today they are a thing of the past.

More than 45 people took part in the development of the project. Today the team includes specialists from all over the world: Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Budapest. Project CEO - Harald Ponce de Lyon manages remote access specialists from Germany.

CMS continues to evolve. A huge army of followers has appeared, consisting of developers, programmers, web designers, business owners. All of them found a simple solution that helps them develop as professionals and increase their income.

How osCommerce helps programmers

If you are a programmer, Harald Ponce de Leon has developed an open source "tool" for you that you can modify and customize to suit your clients' needs. Numerous osCommerce add-ons (over 8000!) allow us to create a modern online store that meets all e-commerce requirements and more.

We decided to fix the osCommerce issue with the lack of themes and templates. Now bright, stylish osCommerce themes attract shoppers with beautiful banners and large photos, well-proportioned blocks with perfect proportions, modern fonts, and easy navigation. There is nothing superfluous and nothing to add here. Templates have been developed for different types of goods, so the possibilities for online sales are endless. osCommerce is an awesome b2b and b2c solution.

An example of a site on CMS SoloMono

OsCommerce development and prospects

In 2005, the number of online stores on the platform reached 2,000, and after 4 years this figure increased to 13,000.

On November 12, 2010, the CEO of the project announced the release of an updated version called osCommerce Online Merchant V2.3. The updated version included the following features:

• Connection of payment systems PayPal Website Payments Pro and PayPal Express Checkout, Moneybookers, Sage Pay
• Guest bookings via PayPal Express Checkout
• New split template based on XHTML / CSS
• Ability to add a video to the product
• jQuery UI design
• CSS-framework 960 Grid System
• Buttons "Share on social networks"
• New widgets in the administration panel
• Google Analytics and Ecommerce Tracking
• Other innovations

The last and official version of osCommerce was CE Phoenix, which is maintained and updated by Phoenix Club members to this day. The platform's CEO is Gary Burton.

CMS osCommerce has inspired other developers to create similar solutions for online stores, including Magento and Batavi. Branches of Zen Cart, xt: Commerce, CRE Loaded, OSC-CMS, oscMAX, SoloMono were also created.

Strong advantages

The CMS is powered by MySQL and PHP, so if your hosting provider supports these programming languages, the integration will be very easy. The second strong advantage of CMS is the unlimited number of downloadable products, both digital and physical.

You can sort all products using numerous filters such as size, color, and model. Software products can be sorted by version, allowing you to open, for example, an online game store.

Another unique feature of the platform is the ability to create a multilingual online store that will provide service to customers around the world. You can also connect the most popular payment systems to the engine, install different currencies and delivery services.

You can create reports on sales, goods, customers, print invoices directly from web pages, install auto-update of currencies, use several store administrators by providing separate access to the admin area. To date, about 8000 add-ons can be installed in the CMS (at the time of this writing, there were more than 8,700). This will be enough for you to connect everything that your imagination can only imagine.

Our experts decided to pay special attention to the design of online stores, to make them modern, stylish, aimed at attracting attention and selling. Today you can choose 1 of 6 designs for your online store.

The osCommerce community

You can become a member of the osCommerce community for only 49 € and get a lot of privileges. Most of the community is an English speaking audience. Of course, you can enter the community for free by simply taking part in the discussions on the osCommerce forum. All this can be done on the osCommerce official website. Today the community includes about 280 thousand members, more than 1.6 million posts have been published on the forum.

SoloMono invites you to become a member of our community. Looking to sell online stores to your customers? Find out about our terms of cooperation.

Conclusions

Today osCommerce is facing stiff competition, but still remains in the global CMS race for online stores. How? Ask developers, programmers, entrepreneurs, who work with the platform daily and get certain results.