awebapart.com
19th March 2009, 16:09
osCommerce v3 alpha 5 (http://www.oscommerce.com/about/news,132) was released this week, and it is the first v3 alpha release that has been described as a "stable production ready release" (as much as any open source system release can be described as production ready since you really should treat it as a base for developing your final system). osCommerce v3 and its various alpha versions have been discussed on this forum (http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=oscommerce+v3+alpha+site:www.ukbusinessfo rums.co.uk&hl=en&filter=0) before. It has been a long time coming, but IMO this week's news is welcome news for those who made the strategic decision to use osCommerce, for those who have been patient, especially in recent times with other systems like Magento, Zencart, Virtuemart getting a lot of the limelight.
It will be interesting to see how this proceeds in the coming weeks and months. Our sitebuilder service currently uses our own custom version of osCommerce v2.2 (http://www.awebapart.com/home/sitebuilder_features) for the online shop part of our sites, and as far as new technology and new versions go, we are quite conservative in our approach to anything IT related (e.g. don't upgrade to the next major version of Windows until service pack 1 is out), so osCommerce v3 wont be something we will rush into, rather test and plan for migration carefully over the coming months.
osCommerce v3 does require (http://blogs.oscommerce.com/2009/03/16/minimum-requirements-for-oscommerce-online-merchant-v30-alpha-5/) PHP v5.2, which might not be good news for those hosting on older versions or even using some recent Redhat or Centos servers, both of these Linux distributions are quite conservative too in their standard stable installations, with the latest Centos v5.2 currently having PHPv5.1.x as its standard install. But there might be a workaround (http://www.boutell.com/scripts/jsonwrapper.html) allowing osCommerce v3 to run on PHPv5.1. Although now that Redhat v5.3 has been released, and when Centos v5.3 follows, the standard PHP version might be upgraded too.
It will be interesting to see how this proceeds in the coming weeks and months. Our sitebuilder service currently uses our own custom version of osCommerce v2.2 (http://www.awebapart.com/home/sitebuilder_features) for the online shop part of our sites, and as far as new technology and new versions go, we are quite conservative in our approach to anything IT related (e.g. don't upgrade to the next major version of Windows until service pack 1 is out), so osCommerce v3 wont be something we will rush into, rather test and plan for migration carefully over the coming months.
osCommerce v3 does require (http://blogs.oscommerce.com/2009/03/16/minimum-requirements-for-oscommerce-online-merchant-v30-alpha-5/) PHP v5.2, which might not be good news for those hosting on older versions or even using some recent Redhat or Centos servers, both of these Linux distributions are quite conservative too in their standard stable installations, with the latest Centos v5.2 currently having PHPv5.1.x as its standard install. But there might be a workaround (http://www.boutell.com/scripts/jsonwrapper.html) allowing osCommerce v3 to run on PHPv5.1. Although now that Redhat v5.3 has been released, and when Centos v5.3 follows, the standard PHP version might be upgraded too.