A few years ago, I had developed an online store for a buddy of mine using osCommerce. I had hoped to use Joomla! or Drupal for the site but at the time wasn't satisfied with the shopping cart extensions or modules that were available for either CMS. Shortly after developing that site a new eCommerce module for Drupal became available called Ubercart. I've never had taken on the task of building another online store (it was a lot of work) but I've always kept my eye on Ubercart just to stay informed.

Ryan Szrama who has been the project lead of Ubercart from its beginning posted yesterday that Ubercart will fork into Drupal Commerce. At this time it is now known what will become of Ubercart. Ryan writes:

A rose by any other name is still a rose, and Ubercore by any other name is still the best thing to happen for Drupal based e-commerce since the advent of Ubercart. For at least the foreseeable future, Ubercore will continue as Drupal Commerce, managed similarly to Drupal itself. We'll be working our tails off to make sure e-commerce on Drupal 7 shows just how awesome having fields in core can be.

As often happens in open source, the trademark owner and some of Ubercart's developers are in disagreement with the direction Ubercart should take in new development. Luckily, for Ryan and the developers of the new project, Ubercart is under the open source GPL license which allows them to use all of source code for Drupal Commerce. This should be an interesting story to follow in the world of open source CMS.

There are very few shopping carts or ecommerce platforms that I'm willing to talk about on a blog for content management systems. For whatever reason, I have always had interest in the Magento Ecommerce platform. The following is a video on the features included in the Magento Enterprise Edition 1.6.

Not sure if I'm early or late to the party, but I just discovered Mixergy.com. Mixergy is a place where 20ish Andrew Warner wants to help ambitious people who love business as much as he does to learn from a mix of experienced mentors. Somebody on the Internet wanting to help you make money, imagine that.

However Mixergy has something that many sites don't have...fantastic interviews of some very influential Web people. Some of the videos that caught my attention included interviews of Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, and most recently, Roy Rubin of Magento. I recommend checking Mixergy.com out.

Last week, Varien and Magento announced an alternative to the community open source Magento ecommerce platform.  That alternative is Magento Enterprise Edition.

Today marks a major milestone for Varien and Magento with the release of the Magento Enterprise Edition. The product is a culmination of months of work and countless feedback from our community, partners and customers. The commercially licensed Magento Enterprise Edition software is the premium grade Magento product. It is geared towards larger companies and includes additional features, including ROI specific features, not available in our open source, Community Edition product. In addition to features, our Enterprise Edition will include SLA based support with guaranteed response times, warranties, indemnification and soon, PA-DSS certification. Learn more about the Enterprise Edition product and compare product editions.

With the launch of our Enterprise Edition, it is important to note our commitment to the open source, Community Edition product. The release of the Magento Enterprise Edition aids us by allowing us to focus on the distinct groups of Magento users, small or large, and to engage each according to their needs, and now, contribute more time and resources to the success of each. More information regarding our community and open source initiatives is detailed below.

For those that are used to getting open source Magento for "free", the starting price of $8,900 USD for the Enterprise Edition may be a little shocking.  However, it's important to note that the Enterprise edition isn't geared toward those smaller "mom and pop" online stores.  Instead the Magento Enterprise edition is intended for those larger corporations that want guarantees in the products they purchase including warranty, indemnification, and full product support via an SLA.

What else does the $8,900 or more give you that the Community Edition (without extensions) doesn't give you?  Some of the additional benefits of the Enterprise Edition over the Community Edition include:

• Advanced Administrator Roles and Permission Restriction per Site (Website and Store View)
• Logging of Administrator Actions
• Gift Certificates/Cards (Physical and Virtual)
• Customer Store Credits
• Content Staging and Merging. Support for both on-demand and scheduled merges and rollbacks of content
• Limited Catalog Access. Category View and Purchase permissions per on customer group
• Private Club Sales including Events, Invitations and Category access permissions
• Strong Data Encryption

Apparently, the introduction of the Enterprise Edition does not mean there will be less support and development for the Community Edition of Magento.  In fact since the announcement of the Enterprise Edition, version 1.3.1 of Magento Community has been released.

A new version of the eccomerce platform, Magento, was released on these last days of March. New features and improvements included in Magento 1.3 since the release of version 1.2 include:

• Added support for customer file upload and date/time/datetime custom options
• Described all methods in WSDL for SOAP web-services to improve compatibility with .NET, Java and other languages
• Frontend Flat Catalog and improved performance. From early test and benchmarks the developers are seeing up to a 40% performance improvement when comparing to Magento 1.2.x both in page loads and memory usage.

That 40% improvement is substantial and the Magento folks are promising the release of more formal resting results soon.

osCommerce announced that their osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 Alpha 5 will be made available on March 11th.  They've also retooled the schedule for additional releases of this well known shopping cart.

osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 Alpha 5 was scheduled for release by the end of February and has been postponed to ensure the quality of the release. It will now be released on Wednesday the 11th of March. This release also brings in a new roadmap and release strategy for the v3.x series.

Our focus has changed with this release from implementing additional features into the core to concentrating on the framework and to add the features to future releases. This allows v3.0 to be released sooner with a stable framework, and allows a much faster release cycle for new features compared to the previous “release every 6 months” release strategy.

New features that can be expected in the new release of osCommerce since Alpha 4 was made available include:

• Product Attributes Implementation
• Dynamic Table Listings (Administration Tool)
• Live Search (Administration Tool)
• Administration Tool sections now self-contained Applications
• Error Logging; both PHP and MySQL errors and warnings now logged (forced runtime usage of PHP E_ALL and MySQL STRICT_ALL_TABLES)
• Stabilized Framework
• Usage of JSON for RPC calls
• Inclusion of jQuery v1.3.2 and jQuery UI v1.6rc6

Additional information about the version 3.0 of the ecommerce platform can found at the osCommerce blog.

Not long ago, I expressed doubts whether osCommerce has a future.  While osCommerce is widely used by thousands of sites, and incidentally the only shopping cart I've ever put into production, its development cycle has been painfully slow for many of its open source contributors and users.  As I've said before, when the 3.0 version of osCommerce is released I find it unlikely that the new osCommerce will have many of the Web 2.0 features that the new breed of
shopping carts currently have now.  I have personal doubts that osCommerce's future is as bright as its past has been.

Harald Ponce de Leon recently wrote at osCommerce.com an article that would counter my opinion and the opinions of naysayers such as me.

The osCommerce community were extremely busy throughout 2008 with
over 700 new add-ons and features being made available for osCommerce
Online Merchant v2.2. That includes over 2,500 updates made by over
1,200 community members in 2008 alone!

There are currently over 5,200 add-ons for osCommerce Online Merchant made available for free by the osCommerce community!

Probably more exciting is Harald's announcement that the new core for osCommerce 3.0 will be ready next month.

2008 has been a great year for osCommerce Online Merchant v2.2 and look
forward to making 2009 an even better year with osCommerce Online
Merchant v3.0, with a production-ready release of the new core engine
being made in February.

So since there is a chance that osCommerce will prove me wrong with the 3.0 version is released, osCommerce will remain in my top 30 CMS list for a little longer.  If osCommerce is better than I expected it to be it will remain under focus here at CMS Report.  However, if it disappoints then osCommerce may just have to be moved into our Hall of Fame.

There are so many great websites out there, but so little time to discover them.  I came across a great site that discusses eCommerce and shopping platforms called Practical eCommerce.

Real folks are behind this company. We are a small business
ourselves, and we take seriously the notion of helping other businesses
decipher the complexities of migrating online or improving their online
operations.

In fact, it was those complexities that gave rise to Practical
eCommerce to begin with. Back in 2003, the Murdocks launched an
ecommerce site. The process was confusing, expensive and frustrating.
But, it did give rise to the idea of helping others in the same predicament. So here we are.

Since I've been busy transferring my sites to new servers this would be a good day for you to check them out.

There it was in front of my eyes.  The headline in osCommerce's forum read, "Is OsC Dead?, Discussion of the Progress of OsC" [link removed by osCommerce folks?].  Despite how some may read the title, the thread isn't about bashing osCommerce.  Instead, it is about users and community members concerned and even fearful of the slow pace of new development for osCommerce.  Despite all the talk about osCommerce 3.0, it has been a year and a half since OsC 3 Alpha 4 was released with the roadmap showing that Alpha 5 and 6 are still under development.  How can one not ask if the future of osCommerce is in jeopardy?

As mentioned at the osCommerce forum, Kerry Watson also has an article out about the new breed of open source shopping carts.  The article starts off with a that was then, this is now statement regarding shopping carts.

While the Big Three of the old guard — osCommerce, Zen Cart, and CRE Loaded — continue to duke it out among themselves, new-generation open source commerce projects have begun to spring up with new ideas and new ways of thinking. Most noteworthy of the new crop are France-based Prestashop and US-based programs Ubercart and Magento.

These fresh Web 2.0-style carts are mature and production-ready contenders, and all are at or beyond version 1.0 in their production cycle. These carts are equal or superior to many commercial e-commerce programs, and are available for free under the GNU or OSL 3.0 Public License. We've previously reviewed Magento, so this column will focus on the other two next-generation carts: PrestaShop and Ubercart.

Personally, I've been working on recommending a friend to upgrade his osCommerce site to either Magento or Drupal's Ubercart.  Even when the 3.0 version of osCommerce is released, it will likely still not have many of the Web 2.0 features that the new breed of shopping carts currently have now.  It's not that I think osCommerce is dead, but I do think that osCommerce has stopped evolving.  Good open source projects never die, they just fade away.

A new version of my favorite shopping cart has been released.  Magento, an open source ecommerce platform, is now available under version 1.1.5.

This version includes many bug fixes for Magento 1.1.x that are listed in the release notes section.

This version also comes with new features:

• New category management tool that will allow store owners to manage a large number of categories, which can be tested on our demo admin site.
• New skin to the Magento Default theme which can be seen here

More information can be found at: http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/mage...