A tool for migrating your osCommerce site to Magento has been updated at Magento Connect.  For those of us that our osCommerce users looking for other options, this is exciting stuff.  The new version offers improvements in UTF8 conversion and product image importing.  This tool even has its very own wiki page.

Webdistortion, a web design studio in Northern Ireland, recently reviewed nine different e-commerce platforms. All nine platforms reviewed were open source software packages.

With e-commerce webdesign really starting to take off, its never been more important to choose a platform which suits you as a developer (i.e. one that you can support) and one that will provide your clients with the features that they need to run a successful online shop.

There are a number of ways of getting a shop online, and we’ve focused primarily on open source e-commerce platforms here.

Those nine e-commerce platforms under review include: osCommerce, ZenCart, VirtueMart (Joomla!/Mambo), Magento, DashCommerce, CubeCart, X-Cart, LiteCommerce, and Shopify. If you're looking for a brief and consolidated review of open source shopping carts, then the Webdistortion reivew is a nice place for you to visit.

For those curious, I found this story via DZone.

Last week marked the official release of Magento 1.0, an open source ecommerce platform. Magento has been on my radar scope for some time thanks to those who have left comments about it here. Since, I likely will have need of a good shopping cart this year for a planned project, I've decided to put some focus on Magento. I will be removing Mambo from my top 30 "CMS Focus" list to make room for Magento. My apologies to Mambo fans.

Magento isn't just a "shopping cart" but attempts to also be an "ecommerce platform". Magento recognizes that it needs to improve and introduce additional features, but for a 1.0 version the variety and quantity of features are impressive. Some of Magento's well rounded features include analytics and reports, RSS feeds, site and content management tools, search engine optimization, promotion tools, and multiple theming.

Harald Ponce de Leon: "We are proud to announce an advancement of the osCommerce 2.2 release series with the new osCommerce Online Merchant v2.2 Release Candidate 2 release. This second release candidate addresses issues introduced in the previous release candidate release and addresses longer termed issues from 2.2 Milestone 2."

Complete Story

osCommerce Webmaster’s Guide to Selling Online is a new book from Packt Publishing that will help users increase their sales and profits with expert tips on SEO, Marketing, Design and Selling Strategies. Written by Vadym Gurevych, this book is packed with expert advice and practical examples of effective store design and report creation to help anyone administering an osCommerce site make better decisions, formulate more effective strategies, and measure success.

osCommerce is an open-source e-commerce solution written in PHP and MySQL that can be set up on various platforms. More than 10,000 businesses and sole traders all around the world have benefited from its features and flexibility. There are many modules for osCommerce that further extend its functionality, making it suitable for almost every business's requirements.

The aim of this article is not to poke holes, or say ‘vBulletin sucks’, but to provide constructive criticism of a successful product, proving that vBulletin is not always the best choice. In places the article compares vBulletin to Drupal, this is the platform The Webmaster Forums will be switching to and represents many of the things vBulletin should—in our humble opinion—aspire to.

Now this was a interesting. A well written article on why one site is switching over to use Drupal's built in forum rather then continue to use vbulletin.

• Administration Tool access levels (about time)
  
• Administrator Log
  
• Administration Tool batch action capabilities

I'm finally down to just the finishing touches on that osCommerce project I mentioned about last month. The site is Dakota Angler, a fishing bait and tackle store, that finally is ready to sell their goods online.

What made the project challenging was that it already had a presence on the Web providing fishing reports, images of big catches by the customers, and an active forum. Having to integrate a new shopping cart around the old site in a way the client was comfortable took some effort. He wanted the online store, but he didn't want to change the existing site so much that he lost his current users or made it difficult for his employees to learn "everything new". There are some practical business decisions as to why you don't want to fancy up a "bait store" too much for the customers.

Just as challenging to work with was the choice of software for the online store, osCommerce. As I've mentioned before, I'm just a little surprised with how much work was required in hacking the core. In osCommerce, I found that the "boxes" and much of the other non-product content are stored in "flat files" and not the database.