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!

We have successfully defended our Trademark and Copyright against eCommerce Ventures Ltd who blatantly registered “osCommerce” as a trademark in the United Kingdom and tried to “pass off” as being osCommerce.

With owning the trademark registration, the firm, comprised of members that were active and are known to many on our community support forums, contacted a number of our former team members, Corporate Sponsors, and community members and gave a deadline of 4 days to respond to handing over domains, ceasing any business relationships with us, and to replace links pointing to our website with theirs.

With the help of the Free Software Foundation Europe / Freedom Task Force of seeking legal aid in the United Kingdom, we appointed Beck Greener as our legal counsel and started legal proceedings against the firm.

As this not only affected our community of store owners and developers but also how Open Source projects and solutions operate, we decided to be open on this issue and to keep the community informed of every step we were taking.

Before our legal counsel could send the first letter, the firm had informally sent us a proposal to quickly resolve the issue of agreeing to let them continue owning the trademark registration and assured its use for SEO purposes only.

As we could obviously not agree to those terms, our legal counsel formerly replied with our demands that were successfully used as a base to later settle out of court.

This included ceasing usage of the osCommerce name, ceasing further distribution of their software and add-ons infringing on our copyright, and to surrender the trademark they had registered.

The support given by the community during this course was truly amazing. We’d like to thank everyone here and in international communities for their support and are immensely proud to have such a caring community! Thank you for being part of it!

We’re kickstarting our public meetings again with a meet-up in London on Friday 11th December 2009 at the Match Bar West End (Oxford Circus) from 5pm onwards. This will be a casual no-presentation meet-up to meet, mingle, and have a few drinks with store owners, developers, and enthusiasts part of our community located in and around London.

Attending osCommerce team members and associates include:

Harald Ponce de Leon
Nick Weisser
Mark Evans
Matthijs van der Vegte

If you would like to meet us and other community members in person, please confirm your attendance at our Facebook page event here:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=166087012682

Please note that this bar requires a minimum age of 18 to enter. Some shared selections will be available to snack on. Those attending will need to pay for their own drink and additional food orders.

Date and Time:

Friday 11th December 2009 from 5pm onwards

Location:

Match Bar West End
37-38 Margaret Street
London W1G 0JF
Nearest Tube: Oxford Circus
Website: http://www.matchbar.com/match_bar_westend.php

We look forward to meeting you!

Sage Pay and osCommerce have partnered to release certified versions of the Sage Pay Form, Server and Direct payment modules to the osCommerce community. This partnership enables merchants to securely process card transactions with the UK’s largest indepenent payment service provider whilst utilising Sage Pay’s latest protocol and product offerings.

The Sage Pay Server module has been updated to include the recently released iframe capability which offer merchants a seamless checkout flow without the customer perception of being redirected away to a hosted payment page. This solution also minimises PCI compliance requirements as no card data is ever stored, processed or transmitted from the merchant’s website.

The certified modules will be included as standard modules in the osCommerce Online Merchant v2.2 release and are available now as add-ons for existing store owners from v2.2 Milestone 2 onwards.

The certified modules are available for free at the osCommerce Add-Ons site:

http://addons.oscommerce.com/service/sage_pay

To compliment the release of the new modules, Sage Pay are offering all osCommerce merchants an introductory 3 months free gateway fees for new Sage Pay sign ups, designed to save osCommerce users money on their transaction processing costs.

OFFER: 3 months free unlimited Sage Pay processing when you sign up to Sage Pay – Saving a minimum of £60! Promotion code “osc223″ Apply here!