osCommerce (“open source Commerce”) is an e-commerce and online store-management software program. It can be used on any web server that has PHP and MySQL installed.
History
osCommerce was started in March 2000 in Germany by project founder and leader Harald Ponce de Leon as The Exchange Project. As of August 2008 the osCommerce site says that there are over 14,000 'live' websites using the program. This number is almost certainly conservative, given the inclusion of osCommerce in hosting panel application installers such as Fantastico (web hosting) and its dependency on osCommerce users linking their sites into the osCommerce Live Stores listings.
In November 2010 the development of osCommerce v2.2 was met with another stable release. Version 2.3, as it was branded, takes advantage of the benefits of Tableless web design, and includes a number of social networking tools.
Version 3.0 has been released on March 31st 2011 and is a major re-write of the program to incorporate an object-oriented backend, a template system to allow easy layout changes, and inclusion of an administration-area username and password definition during installation.
The latest version is 3.0.2, and was released on 6th August 2011. This version was "a minor release that focuses on bug fixes, framework improvements, and introduction of new Applications." (From the osCommerce website)
Versions
There are currently two supported stable releases of osCommerce. Versions 3.0 and 2.3 are developed as two independent programs, and as such do not share code. Contributions, the official name for the open-source community developed plugins, are developed for either 2.x or 3.0, and are incompatible with one another. There is much more support, and are many more contributions for osCommerce version 2 releases than version 3. Contributions are updated, or released daily.
Branches
Distributed under the GNU General Public License, osCommerce is one of the earliest PHP based Open Source shopping cart software distributions. As such, it has spawned a number of forks including Zen Cart and Batavi.
Criticisms
In August 2011 3 vulnerabilities in version 2.2 of the OsCommerce system were exploited, allowing the addition of an iframe and javascript code to infect visitors to websites. Armorize reports this allowed infected web pages to hit 90,000 in a very short time until it was noticed and increasing further to 4.5 million pages within the space of a week. OsCommerce 2.3 was released in November 2010 with the security holes already patched.
Customization via add-on or custom code means that installation of additional add-ons may require manual rather than automated installation.
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