OsCommerce

osCommerce

Developer(s)	Harald Ponce de Leon
Stable release	2.3.3.4 / 26 September 2013 (2013-09-26)
Written in	PHP
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Webshop
License	GNU General Public License
Website	www.oscommerce.com

OsCommerce (styled "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 Delux,^[2] and Softaculous.^[3] The backlink growth somewhat depends upon 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.^[4]

Version 3.0 is currently being developed 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 development version is 3.0.2, and was released on 6 August 2011.^[5]

Versions

There are currently two releases of osCommerce. Versions 2.3 (stable) and 3.0 (in development) 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.^[6]

Various releases of OsCommerce are provided by the GitHub osCommerce project or Directly from osCommerce.com

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 2011 and patched the exploited security holes.^[10][11]

See also

• Comparison of shopping cart software
• Comparison of free software eCommerce web application frameworks
• List of online payment service providers

References

External links

• osCommerce official site
• OsCommerce on the Open Directory Project

Further reading