oscommerce and oscmax compatibility

[spuhg]

hi

is oscmax 2.5 a modified reflection of oscommerce v3.0 Alpha 5?

will oscommerce advance to a new framework, while oscmax will generally stay a reflection of oscommerce milestone 2.2?

when oscommerce transitions to v3.0 Alpha 5 will mods for it stlll be easily ported to oscmax, or even easier?

is there any sort of synchronizing software that will modify the base code of oscmax to make it the same as v3.0 Alpha 5 while keeping current the mods that make oscmax?

thanks

[met00]

The "base" of osCmax 2.5 was.... osCmax 2.0.

The OSC based community is large, and there have been many spinoffs, of which osCmax is one. In many cases the spinoffs have opted to charge money for versions, which are all still built on the MS2.2 core. One that did not was ZenCart. Zen was started by a bunch of the MS2.2 contributors that wanted Harold to change the direction of OSC, move to a more OO php approach as well as a MVC approach. When Harold indicated that he wasn't going that route, they moved off to start Zen. And, if you look at the code base for Zen you can see that they did take that approach to some degree.

As one of the developers involved with this last release, I really would be against changing the core. My reasoning is that the core is stable and secure. That is a very big issue for me as a developer because the software involved financial transactions and managing consumer financial data and I really want to ensure that nothing we do reduces that feeling of confidence. The code base performs and scales well on every platform I have seen, and some people are running versions of osCmax with in excess of 10,000 products.

There was some initial discussion, before 2.5 was started, about moving to a template engine, like smarty. I have mixed feelings about that as I see both the upside and the downside of making that kind of move. I am much more interested in providing a generic CSS based template with a jquery interface and the ability to ajaxify more of the process so some of the load moves from the server to the clients and if resources remain limited to th current development team I would argue that ajaxifying the catalog would be a higher priority than moving to the templating engine.

Now, that is ONE developers opinion, and believe me, we all have differing opinions and priorities. Keeping "faith" with the mothership is nice, but the goal (in my never humble opinion) is not to be an osCommerce derivative, but to be the best possible solution for someone looking for a complete e-commerce solution. If OSC makes a move that pulls it away from its roots and makes a massive change in HOW mods are integrated, then there is a risk that osCmax will fall out of line from being "easy to incorporate a OSC mod" to where it may be a bit harder to implement a mod from one to the other. If that is the case, then it will become incumbent upon the developer community to find those mods that have the greatest interest within our community and come up with solutions as osCmax projects.

[remember, my opinion is worth what you paid for it...]

[spuhg]

maybe somehow the core could be made oscommerce v 3.0(object oriented design) but would have a module that would allow all current mods to still work, but would provide a new object oriented interface for future mods?

[spoofy]

I love oscMax. I have used Magento, Yahoo Stores, ProStores, Volusion, Interspire, CS-Cart and osCommerce.

I went away from osCommerce long time ago because the masses gave me the "illusion" that the other carts are much more advanced and up to date. To a certain extent it is true. But they all have a lot of drawbacks...again A LOT of drawbacks..The best ones out of those were cs-cart and Interspire. CS-Cart's major drawback was heavy reliance on a template engine (smarty) and Interspire abandoned their downloadable version for hosted one (bigcommerce)

After all was said and done, I gave oscommerce another chance and realized that with the massive section of contributions available, anything can be quickly put together.

For the last 6 or 7 months, I have been working on it tirelessly and if I were to show you what I have, you wouldn't believe that it's osCommerce. We are talking about features such as layered navigation, optional accessories while purchasing products with attributes, attributes done right (generate combinations unique for each product), stock and inventory management including attributes level, ajax shopping cart (similar to amazon), ajax quick view, custom url slugs, etc. etc. etc. I can go on with the list.

Now few months ago I stumbled on oscMax and felt stupid because oscMax would've been a much better project for me to build on instead of virgin oscommerce.

My point is, that oscmax has been a great product so far and it is my opinion to leave any other framework or engine out of it such as smarty etc.

[met00]

@spuhg

As one voice of six, I would say "No.", but that's just me. The amount of effort that went into the upgrade from 2.0-2.5 was thousands of man hours by a very dedicated core team.

A little history. I started working on OSC in early 2002 (about the time Michael was creating oscdox) and started getting active in September 02. That was about the release of OSC2.0. In fact, I was using Ian Wilson's Loaded V as my base (the first OSC Package not released by Harald and long before CRE got it's hand into it). Loaded V had about 10-20 pre-loaded mods (Ian's and Linda McGraths and 1 or 2 others). Throughout 2002 and 2003 I watched as Ian and Linda and their portion of the core team debated publicly with Harald, and then they split. MS2.2 came out and I created and installed my own mods for myself and my clients. [oh my, in researching my reply I had to log into the old OSC forums and saw that I released recover carts way back in Oct '03... (oh my gawd, that code looks so... yuck!) I have been working with this way too long... hmmm why was wkdwich looking at my profile there?]

Anyway, the purpose of giving you the history is that I have seen the glacial speed at which OSC moved (something that Ian and others had commented on way back in 2002) and I have seen the way that the team Michael has put together has moved on osCmax. I think the MS2.2 final release was in 2002, and here we are in 2011 and V3 is still not a reality. I'm not sure that hooking osCmax's cart to that slow moving horse is really a good idea.

Like I said, if Harald finally gets around to releasing it, and someone builds a mod for it that is so great that this community wants to incorporate the mods functionality,well we do have some real talented developers here and I can't see why that wouldn't be done.

@spoofy

I don't know if you have been playing with the 2.5 Beta 2, but If you have modded MS2.2 with all you have said I would appreciate your feedback as a Beta Tester. I also hear you on templates via smarty. Personally I was all for it a year ago, but as I have become more involved with jquery and CSS over the last 12 months I have had a change of opinion there and am more interested in reducing the user load and wait time with ajaxifying as much of the cart as I can.

[spuhg]

oscommerce has such a huge user base, so commercial developers are basing their products on oscommerce, and oscmax seems left out, maybe oscmax could eventually be made to integrate with all oscommerce mods seamlessly, and become a better oscommerce.

[spoofy]

@spoofy

I don't know if you have been playing with the 2.5 Beta 2, but If you have modded MS2.2 with all you have said I would appreciate your feedback as a Beta Tester. I also hear you on templates via smarty. Personally I was all for it a year ago, but as I have become more involved with jquery and CSS over the last 12 months I have had a change of opinion there and am more interested in reducing the user load and wait time with ajaxifying as much of the cart as I can.

I started off with 2.2rca and upgraded to the 2.3.1 so have no experience with ms2.2. I am using the oscmax 2.5 from I think 2 months ago when it was first released based on version conversion from 2.1. I haven't used it extensively but truth be told I am impressed. The code is nicely done and documented.

I am involved mostly in apparel / fashion industry so 2 things are of the utmost importance to me. 1) Pictures and 2) size/color combination. With Pictures, I had to come up with a solution to resize in such a way as to not crop and fit them inside a specific size frame. I used the verot.net upload class and rewrote the entire image management myself. With Size/Color using the attributes was not possible, because I need a way to handle in stock and out of stock without using the quantity (simple toggle buttons), with the ability to have vendor sku, upc code and images for each combination on an attribute level. So that took me a long time. Now all my employee does is adds th attributes (size: S,M,L and color: Red,Blue) and clicks on create combination and viola! It does it. They then assign the combination Red with red pictures and Blue with blue pictures.

oscommerce has such a huge user base, so commercial developers are basing their products on oscommerce, and oscmax seems left out, maybe oscmax could eventually be made to integrate with all oscommerce mods seamlessly, and become a better oscommerce.

oscMax works with any and all oscommerce mods. You have to understand that even oscommerce becomes complicated as you install more and more mods. A lot of mods are poorly written so step 1 is generally to do minor modifications and then install them. Although I haven't added any oscommerce mods to oscmax, but I have looked at a lot of code in oscmax and I can tell you that it shouldn't be that difficult.

[met00]

With Size/Color using the attributes was not possible, because I need a way to handle in stock and out of stock without using the quantity (simple toggle buttons), with the ability to have vendor sku, upc code and images for each combination on an attribute level. So that took me a long time. Now all my employee does is adds th attributes (size: S,M,L and color: Red,Blue) and clicks on create combination and viola! It does it. They then assign the combination Red with red pictures and Blue with blue pictures.

May I suggest a solution in Family Products. I am reworking the mod to work in 2.5, but you can see it in action at
- PACON - Riverside® Groundwood Construction Paper 12x18 [paconrivcp1218] - - Discount School Supplies - Discount Education Supplies from Education 4 Kids, Inc. : - PACON - Riverside® Groundwood Construction Paper 12x18 [paconrivcp1218] -
in an osCmax 2.0 store.

Here each item is a product, associated to the parent - So,you can have a dress say of "Betsey Johnson Ruched Strapless Dress" that is available in six sizes and five colours. The parent is "Betsey Johnson Ruched Strapless Dress" and the children are
Red - Size 4 - Betsey Johnson Ruched Strapless Dress
Black - Size 4 - Betsey Johnson Ruched Strapless Dress
Red - Size 5 - Johnson Ruched Strapless Dress

Now since each of these is a product itself, the stock for the product and the model/sku is different for each one

In the parent you have to have a "colour picker" that when selected brings up an image of that colour dress (this could be a jquery/ajax routine that loads the div for the image with a new image when the user selects the colour).

As you can see from the paper link, you can't actually buy the parent, but all the children can be added to the cart.

The problems you mentioned are ones I have always had with attributes and I have found that this solution works very well. We also use this solution for "parts". In that case you show the schematic and each child has the schematic number next to the model.