Help Rebuild OsCommerce

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Benjamin
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Help Rebuild OsCommerce

Post by Benjamin »

As you may remember I spoke recently about rebuilding osCommerce. Obviously this is a big application that has some great ideas and I believe it can definitely use a make over. This would be a very popular revision.

This would be a great project for everyone involved. (Great to put on a resume as well) I'd like to keep it Open Source, but there is a lot of money to be made in doing customizations for the store. Obviously we would be in the best position to do this after refactoring it.

Here are a few things I'd like to see done to it. None of these are set in stone.

1.Remove as much code bloat as possible
2.Remove support for multiple languages ( I know I'll probably catch some hell for that one, at the very least it should have an option to be disabled, so that store owners aren't asked to enter everything in 3 different languages )
3.Remove all the tables and move to a CSS based layout
4.Fix all the bugs
5.Optimize it for speed

Basically in order for this to get done:

1.We need a project leader(s) who is somewhat experienced with refactoring and who can point us in the right direction. I'm not going to say that I have that ability, but hopefully someone from the forum will volunteer. This would be a learning experience.
2.We need multiple programmers who can pledge X number of hours per month. Something like 10 hours a month or so. I figure if we get 10 people working 10 hours a month, that means we will get 100 hours of work done on it per month. Obviously the more the better, but this will be up to the project leader because we need to keep everything organized. I figure if you can't work your 10 hours 1 month, you can make them up the next.
3.We need a couple experienced designers to create a nice CSS based design that will really make this application stand out.
4.Tons of little things, coding conventions, a new name for it, etc etc will all need to be worked out. I figure we can just vote majority rules on all that when the time comes.

So does this sound good?
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Oren
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Post by Oren »

Are you talking about a new shopping cart or fixing OsCommerce?
Anyway, if the design is supplied, I can convert it into valid XHTML and CSS.
About PHP work, I don't think I can help - we still have the book to work on...
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Benjamin
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Post by Benjamin »

Well the design is pretty much going to be built from scratch so it will be valid. I'm not talking about fixing osCommerce, more along the lines of refactoring/rebuilding it from the ground up.
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Oren
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Post by Oren »

astions wrote:I'm not talking about fixing osCommerce, more along the lines of refactoring/rebuilding it from the ground up.
I'm still confused... You mean like starting a new open source shopping cart project (totally not related to OsCommerce) or you are talking about rebuilding OsCommerce as the title suggests?
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Luke
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Post by Luke »

I'm game. I have some ideas though that are not osCommerce at all. I would rather build an all-new cart than an osCommerce Lite. I still don't quite have the time, but I can definately start with input on design and such.
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Oren
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Post by Oren »

Meanwhile, we can get some ideas here: http://shopify.com/screenshots/
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Benjamin
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Post by Benjamin »

The Ninja Space Goat wrote:I'm game. I have some ideas though that are not osCommerce at all. I would rather build an all-new cart than an osCommerce Lite. I still don't quite have the time, but I can definately start with input on design and such.
I don't want to pull a bunch of features and make a lite version, but I'm thinking there is a lot of garbage code we can pull out of it. Whatever time you can put in is great. We just need to make sure it's moving forward, even if only slowly.

Oren, I mean rebuild the store, as in go through all the existing pages and pull out the junk. Most of them are pretty easy to rewrite, but there are a few monsters in there, and probably 0.5% is commented. It's almost all procedural though so it's very easy to read.

Once we are done we can throw up a web site for it and throw it up on hotscripts.com. Add new features, whatever we feel like.
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feyd
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Post by feyd »

If you're serious about building/fixing this, I'd suggest putting up a version control with write access for those involved as quickly as possible so you can just go in and fix as time permits.
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Benjamin
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Post by Benjamin »

feyd wrote:If you're serious about building/fixing this, I'd suggest putting up a version control with write access for those involved as quickly as possible so you can just go in and fix as time permits.
Hmm, Sourceforge or google code..
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Luke
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Post by Luke »

I'd prefer to go as much OOP as possible. This would make allowing modules/plugins much easier, and I think the key to any system like this is going to be modularity. Make one good product, and allow for a lot of extension.

One of my main goals in this project would be to develop my skills. This would be a great way to get some real OOP experience.
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feyd
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Post by feyd »

astions wrote:Hmm, Sourceforge or google code..
If you're asking me.. as of right now, I'd say Google.
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Benjamin
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Post by Benjamin »

Sounds good. I created an account on google and sourceforge. It looks like google uses subversion, which is supposed to be better than cvs.
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Luke
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Post by Luke »

My vote is for google, but I don't have any experience with it... I just want to try it out. :D
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feyd
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Post by feyd »

Google, SourceForge and Berlios all run Subversion now. The latter two also have CVS for "old timers." :)
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Benjamin
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Post by Benjamin »

Ok, here is where we are at..
  • 1 (2 if Oren is in) people willing to layouts/graphic design
  • 2 Programmers, including myself
  • Subversion account setup on google, with the name devnetstore (this can be changed if need be)
  • The store will use the GNU General Public License 2 http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt (I believe there is no choice in this matter)
  • No files have been uploaded yet
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