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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

http://www.ipo.gov.uk/tm/t-find/t-find-number?detailsrequested=C&trademark=2512693

This is a continued effort of a derivative group titled “The New osCommerce Project” (now “The osCommerce Project”) to try and take over and own the success of osCommerce which we all have, as a community, worked hard on in the past 9 years since the start of osCommerce in March 2000.

This is being addressed legally and are confident that we will prevail in defending and protecting our rights.

If you have been addressed by eCommerce Ventures Ltd concerning their registration of the “osCommerce” Trademark, please contact legal@oscommerce.com and forward the relevant communication means you were contacted with.

A topic on our community support forums exists where you can provide support and feedback:

http://forums.oscommerce.com/index.php?showtopic=343171

We will keep the community officially informed of our legal defense through our blogs and newsletter.

Thank you for all of your continued support!

The maintenance of the server hosting the community support forums also affects the add-ons site where developers will have to wait until the server is back online to be able to upload their add-ons again.

This blogging entry will be updated with further information during the maintenance period.

Update:

The maintenance of the server has completed successfully and is back online in full operation.

Checkout by Amazon is a complete e-commerce checkout solution that provides your customers with the same secure and trusted checkout experience available on Amazon.com today. It offers unique features including Amazon’s 1-Click®; and tools for businesses to manage shipping charges, sales tax, promotions, and post-sale activities including refunds, cancellations, and chargebacks.

You can now integrate Checkout by Amazon with your osCommerce based online store using the latest certified versions of our add-ons:

• Checkout by Amazon (for osCommerce Online Merchant v2.2MS2 and v2.2RC1)
• Checkout by Amazon 2.1 (for osCommerce Online Merchant v2.2RC2)

Free Processing Offer!

We are pleased to offer free payment processing through September 30, 2009 to businesses and organizations that begin accepting Amazon Payments using Checkout by Amazon and Amazon Simple Pay. If you haven’t signed up yet, learn more and sign up today. See details, terms and conditions of the offer here.

Free Webinar!

Checkout by Amazon: Inviting Amazon customers to shop on your site

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

In this webinar we will introduce you to Checkout by Amazon. We will talk about the important features of Checkout by Amazon and demonstrate the customer experience. We will also highlight how you can use our osCommerce add-ons to integrate with Checkout by Amazon. If you are a merchant, a solution provider or a developer working with merchants, this webinar is for you.

Register Now!

Feel free to contact us with questions/comments/feedback in our support channel on the osCommerce community support forums:

http://forums.oscommerce.com/index.php?showforum=72

Foreign key relationships allows records to be linked together through multiple database tables, for example, linking products to categories. Until now, when a product was to be deleted using the Administration Tool, extra PHP code had to be written within the delete function to also delete entries in other database tables that shared a relationship with the product being deleted.

This is fine for standard installations where the relationships between database tables are known, however when add-ons create new database tables during installation, changes were required in core source code files to also perform database actions on the tables they created.

Now with foreign key relationships, changes to core source code files are no longer required and changes to the related database tables are performed natively on InnoDB databases or automatically through the database class for MyISAM databases. This cleans the codebase considerably and allows one simple query to take care of the whole database. For example:

delete from osc_products where products_id = 1

This one simple query now automatically takes care of deleting the product language definitions, product reviews, category assignments, special prices, shopping cart entries, and any other product table relationships without any additional queries or PHP code necessary.

The following foreign key constraints are supported for MyISAM databases for both ON UPDATE and ON DELETE operations:

• CASCADE, automatically update or delete child records when a parent record is being updated or deleted (eg, delete all product related information when a product is being deleted)
• SET NULL, automatically sets the child record field value to null when a parent record is being updated or deleted (eg, clear the product manufacturer value when a manufacturer is being deleted)
• RESTRICT, prevents a parent record from being updated or deleted if child records depend on it (eg, don’t allow order status levels to be deleted if they are in use by orders)

Add-On developers can take advantage of foreign keys by defining relationships directly in the database schema for InnoDB databases, and by entering relationships in the osc_fk_relationships table for MyISAM databases. Examples of foreign keys defined in the osc_fk_relationships table are:

The osc_fk_relationships table is only used for MyISAM databases and is used by the database class to check on the defined constraints when UPDATE and DELETE queries are being performed.

There are currently 68 foreign key relationships defined that will be introduced in the osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 Beta 1 release.

The changes are currently available in my development branch at GitHub and will be pushed to the main development branch after further testing and code clean up has been performed. My branch is available at:

http://github.com/haraldpdl/oscommerce/

Documentation on MySQL’s foreign key implementation can be found here:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/innodb-foreign-key-constraints.html

The official Git development repository is hosted on Github where developers can network with each other and share the changes they have made.

A screencast presentation is available to show you how easy it is to fork the official repository to make your changes to, and how these changes can be merged back to the official repository.

This is our first screencast presentation and look forward to your feedback. Have fun!