A look at osCommerce and its offspring

[mandy]

This is the first in a series on osCommerce, the popular free, open-source shopping cart alternative, and the industry it has spawned.

osCommerce was one of the first full-featured shopping cart programs. A shopping cart is a program that makes it easy for a user to sell goods online with pictures and descriptions of products for sale, and to accept credit card payments that are automatically deposited into your bank account.

Today there are four major players in the osCommerce industry: the original osCommerce, Zen Cart, CRE Loaded and osC-MAX. There are also a handful of smaller players. Some of these carts sprang from the original open source osCommerce project. Others were inspired by osCommerce, and have a similar look and feel, but the programmers started from scratch to build their own systems. Because some of these are not true osCommerce programs, even though these programs share many similarities, we say "OSC industry" when we are referring to this extended family...

full article: http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions...hp/3715606

[mandy]

Part 2 of the article:

The first program to branch from osCommerce was "Ian's Loaded, Version 1" by Ian C. Wilson, an early member of the osCommerce community listed as member number seven on the osCommerce forum's rolls. Ian's loaded began in late 2000 as osCommerce Milestone 1 with twenty additional contributions installed, many of them written by Wilson.

When the second, extensively-rewritten version of osCommerce, was released in 2002, osCommerce Milestone 2.0, the Ian's Loaded team divided into two camps. One of the camps wanted to remain an official branch project in the osCommerce family, starting fresh with the new MS2, and inserting the now twenty-three contributions. Remaining a branch of the OSC family allows users to continue to use existing contributions to modify their own copy of the program.

The other camp, headed by Wilson, wanted to start with completely fresh code, keeping much of the look and feel of osCommerce but creating a forked project. That project would later become Zen Cart.

The Ian's Loaded remained in the osCommerce family, becoming CRE Loaded (more on that later on), and Wilson left his namesake project behind...

full article: http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions...hp/3722381

[Kristijntje]

Part 3:

Best Open Source Commerce Program
By a margin of three to one, CRE Loaded was named by respondents as the best open source commerce program. Zen Cart and osC-MAX were in a statistical dead heat for second place, with the venerable osCommerce receiving the fewest votes. The respondents' actual responses to the survey questions help explain these results.

When asked specific questions to find out why respondents ranked their program the top winner, both CRE Loaded and osC-MAX were rated by respondents extremely as easy or somewhat easy to install and add additions.  osCommerce was rated somewhat difficult to install and upgrade, and Zen Cart ranked a neutral "neither difficult nor easy." ...

full article: http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/resources...hp/3729961