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. It is available as free software under the GNU General Public License.
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.[1] This number is almost certainly conservative, given the inclusion of osCommerce in hosting panel application installers such as Fantastico (web hosting) [2] 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.[3]
Version 3.0 has been released on March 31, 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 6 August 2011.[4]
Versions
There are currently two supported stable releases of osCommerce. Versions 2.3 and 3.0 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.[5]
Various releases of OsCommerce are provided below:[6]
|
| March 12, 2000 | The Exchange Project Preview Release 1.0 |
| May 14, 2000 | The Exchange Project Preview Release 1.1 |
| December 2, 2000 | The Exchange Project Preview Release 2.0 |
| December 13, 2000 | The Exchange Project Preview Release 2.0a |
| March 6, 2001 | The Exchange Project Preview Release 2.1 |
| February 17, 2003 | osCommerce 2.2 Milestone 1 |
| December 7, 2003 | osCommerce 2.2 Milestone 2 |
| November 12, 2005 | osCommerce 2.2 Milestone 2 Update 051112 |
| November 13, 2005 | osCommerce 2.2 Milestone 2 Update 051113 |
| August 17, 2006 | osCommerce 2.2 Milestone 2 Update 060817 |
| July 3, 2007 | osCommerce Online Merchant 2.2 RC1 |
| January 16, 2008 | osCommerce Online Merchant 2.2 RC2 |
| January 30, 2008 | osCommerce Online Merchant 2.2 RC2a |
| November 12, 2010 | osCommerce Online Merchant 2.3 |
| November 14, 2010 | osCommerce Online Merchant 2.3.1 |
| March 31, 2011 | osCommerce Online Merchant 3.0 |
| August 6, 2011 | osCommerce Online Merchant 3.0.2 |
| July 18, 2012 | osCommerce Online Merchant 2.3.2 |
| August 15, 2012 | osCommerce Online Merchant 2.3.3 |
Branches
Distributed under the GNU General Public License, osCommerce is one of the earliest PHP based Open Source shopping cart software distributions.[7] As such, it has spawned a number of forks including Zen Cart,[8] and Batavi [9]
Publicised vulnerabilities
In August 2011 three 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 made available in November 2010 and had already patched the exploited security holes.[10][11]
See also
References
External links
Further reading
- Watson, Kerry. The osCommerce Technical Manual. Victoria, BC Canada: On Demand Manuals. pp. 11–14 ISBN 1-4120-3733-6.
- Gurevych, Vadym . osCommerce Webmaster's Guide to Selling Online. Birmingham, UK: Packt Publishing. p. 2 ISBN 1-84719-202-5.
