It came to my attention tonight (in an odd venue) that the OSCommerce team is working on a new version. This was news to me so I ran over and checked. Turns out that the new version is:
- Still in PHP
- Still tied to MySQL
- Finally going to fix some of the holes that have not been fixed in the download version for years (though you can usually find fixes in the forums)
- Has some pretty cool new features
- Rumor has it the 3.0 “alpha” versions will not be available as upgrades from the existing versions… no upgrade tool will exist till final release
- Late ๐
Now, OSCommerce is one of the few Open Source packages I still wind up putting into client sites (other than PHP, WordPress and MySQL) but to be honest, I hate it each time. The tool itself is emblematic of the Open Source community as a whole. It is workable, even powerful but crufty, slow, badly managed and poorly supported.
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of commercial software has the same problems. That’s my point really, the Open Source process that is claimed as this huge advancement in how things are done is a total fizzle. No better, no worse. And having the source to something like OpenCommerce is pretty much useless. Maintaining a custom branch of that codebase would be a nightmare, so applying a local patch of a problem would be more trouble than its worth.
Ah well, I appreciate all their hard work. Maybe the next version will help.