mis apuntes oscommerce

I registered on the English and German osCommerce forums back in February 2003 when I first got in contact with the project. I posted and answered questions and made some contributions to existing add-ons. Two years ago in December 2007, Harald asked me if I’d like to become an official team member which I gladly accepted. Since then I’ve been helping with the German and English documentation, the German language pack for osCommerce 3.0, as well as some small bug fixes here and there. Currently, I’m working on a wireframe for the front end layout of version 3.0.

During the last 2 years as a team member I participated in various discussions on Skype and on the internal mailing list, but I never met any of the other team members in person. This changed in December 2009 when after a long break of official meetings, the first osCommerce public meet-up took place in London on 11th.

In the early afternoon I met with Harald, Mark, Jan and Matthijs from the team before the official event and enjoyed various interesting talks about each person’s professional career and long experience in e-commerce as well as their participation in the project.

Later on we all went from Paddington to Oxford Circus to the official event by tube where I had a chance to talk to community members such as Gary Burton and Mark Samios, as well as Bruno Lévêque and Igor Schlumberger, the co-founders of another open source e-commerce project called Prestashop.

I had come to London together with my wife and therefore already left the meet-up around 8pm to spend the rest of the evening with my wife. We also took the chance to do some shopping and sight seeing the day before the meet-up. It was a great short trip and I really enjoyed the event!

I’m looking forward to meeting more community members at next spring’s 10 year osCommerce birthday celebration which will shortly be announced on our blogs and on Facebook. Stay tuned!

We had a fantastic meet-up in London last Friday – I’d like to thank everyone again for the great evening. It was great meeting with team members again and meeting community members around London for the first time!

I arrived in London on Wednesday and had a hotel in Paddington. The hotels here serve their purpose and Paddington is great for travelling to and from London Heathrow and for getting around Central London with the underground. I learned the hard way from my previous visit not to blindly trust hotel/restaurant public wifi networks (those two “AwEsOmE” messages from Twitter were not from me ) so this time my network traffic went through a secure OpenVPN connection.

I met with Mark Evans at his work office in Waterloo and spent the day catching up. I also showed him what I had been working on with visual changes to the Administration Tool, jQuery interactions, and the new Product Types feature. The new Product Types feature allows the checkout procedure to be streamlined and we came up with some interesting ideas to pursue.

We met again on Thursday in Paddington and spent the day coding. Mark worked on some bug fixes and I did some more work on the Product Types implementation. We used Mockingbird to come up with the following concepts on how the checkout procedure can be optimized:

Shopping Cart

Checkout Confirmation 1

Checkout Confirmation 2

The idea is to store all calculated shipping rates for the shopping cart (currently only the cheapest or selected rate is stored) and to select a payment method by default (this would be the first payment method in sort order). This would be displayed on the checkout confirmation page with changes occurring through javascript or page reloads if javascript is disabled.

Interesting concepts! I’ll be publishing more information on the new Product Types feature this week when the changes are committed to Github.

On Friday we met for Lunch in Paddington. Matthijs van der Vegte and Yolande arrived first. I came and shortly afterwards Mark, Nick Weisser, and Jan Zonjee arrived. It was great catching up and meeting Nick for the first time. Getting closer to 5pm we then made our way to Oxford Circus and to the Match Bar where the public meet-up was organized.

One of the first there was Gary Burton (burt) who has been involved in the community since the early days. I didn’t actually get an opportunity to speak to him until the end of the event. There’s just not enough time to be able to talk to everyone – one reason for choosing the Match Bar was due to their open seating arrangements which can get everyone involved in a discussion, unfortunately the high volume the music was playing at kept this down to one-on-one discussions.

It was also great to have Bruno Lévêque and Igor Schlumberger attend (the co-founders of Prestashop in France). We discussed how they operate and how Open Source Licenses are used with the work we do. We’ll be looking at organizing a public meet-up with them in France next year which will be of definite interest to both communities!

I enjoyed talking to Mark Samios (enigma1), Vadym Gurevych (Holbi), Stewart Christie (scchristie), and all who were there.

John Salter from Yubico also attended and managed to have a quick talk to him as he was leaving. He brought some Yubikeys to hand out – the remaining Yubikeys will be handed out to community members with a competition that will run once the add-on has been certified.

It was a successful meet-up, and was a great start of organizing more for next year.

At the end of the meet-up, going back to our hotels, I enjoyed one last drink with Jan and we talked about the Product Types implementation. He mentioned it would be a great way to support products needing a minimum quantity order, which the implementation is perfectly suited for. This brings total flexibility into the checkout procedure and am excited about the possibilities the community will provide through add-ons.

I flew back to Düsseldorf Airport on Saturday after visiting the German Christmas Market at Hyde Park and doing some shopping at Oxford Circus (I really love Hamley’s ).

Nick made some photos of the meet-up so keep an eye out for those!