"The goal of the osCommerce project is to continually evolve by attracting a community that supports the ongoing development of the project at its core level and extensively through contributions to provide additional functionality to the already existing rich feature set." Why shouldn't I use it?

Here's his five reasons:

• no separation of logic and presentation
• difficult to integrate into an existing design
• security
• cannot have multiple sizes of image previews
• admin navigation issues

He includes some other options, too, just to give you an idea of what else is out there.

If you use osCommerce for your site's e-commerce, and you're not happy with the quality or quantity of visitors your site receives, keep reading. Though osCommerce provides some excellent features, its weaknesses could be getting in the way of giving you the number of visitors and conversions you expect. Fortunately, there's a solution, hidden in something as simple as a title tag.

The trick is in editing two files - the main index and a product info page - to add in a bit of PHP at the top that pulls out the matching category information for the item and pushes that into the $title variable for output.

The Microsoft Web Application Installer (Web AI) is a companion to Web PI, and provides a super easy way to download, install and configure many popular community and open source applications on IIS7. Available applications include DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti, osCommerce, PHPBB, and Wordpress, with more on the way.

You can find out more about this web installer and the Microsoft Platform tools from this page on Microsoft's site or in this Web AI forum (where you can also provide your own feedback).

Just now I was looking at some crappy OSCommerce code, and deciding how to rip it up into a template system. And I'm talking with kyle, and the proverbial question comes up, do you give your template system objects, or strings. What if you gave it special "active record"-esque template objects. Active Printers... or something. Then you could work with everything in a consistent interface, escaping all content with htmlspecialchars if needed, etc etc. Looping through object data and making a table...

The email included a block of concept code of how he pictured it working - a pretty simple system really. Pushing data into the class and showing what tag(s) to style it with and have it "know" how to format it (like a phone number string). Michael asks his readers if they've seen something like this before.

Comments already made include discussions of things like xmlWriter, presentation and business logic, and the Savant templating library.

He quotes from the oscommerce.com site about what their goal for the software is and the methods they're working at to achieve those goals. Then comes his reasons for not wanting to use their software - five of them on differing subjects:

• no separation of logic and presentation
• difficult to integrate into an existing design
• security
• cannot have multiple sizes of image previews
• admin navigation issues

He quotes from their site where it mentions that their goal is to "continually evolve by attracting a community [...] to provide additional functionality to the already existing rich feature set."

Of the five raeasons he gives, here are a few:

• difficult to integrate into an existing design
• admin navigation issues
• security

While some of the issues her points out here are a matter of personal preference, the "security" aspect caught my eye. These days, especially with all of the talk about security in the PHP community, that should be one of the first things groups look at in their software. From his comments, OSCommerce doesn't make it very easy to implement a patch either.]]> Tue, 07 Mar 2006 07:09:38 -0600