Developer(s) Harald Ponce de Leon Operating system | Written in PHP Type Webshop | |
Stable release 2.3.4 / 5 June 2014 (2014-06-05) License GNU General Public License | ||
OsCommerce (styled "osCommerce" - "open source Commerce") is an e-commerce and online store-management software program. It can be used on any web server that has PHP and MySQL installed. It is available as free software under the GNU General Public License.
Contents
History
OsCommerce was started in March 2000 in Germany by project founder and leader Harald Ponce de Leon as The Exchange Project. In its infancy, OsCommerce was referred to by Ponce de Leon as "a side thing" and "an example research study". By late 2001, a team formed for its development and in the words of HPDL, this was the point the team started taking the project seriously.
As of August 2008, OsCommerce reported over 14,000 'live' websites using the program. This number is almost certainly conservative, given the inclusion of OsCommerce in hosting panel application installers such as Fantastico and Softaculous.
In November 2010 the development of OsCommerce v2.2 was met with another stable release. Version 2.3, as it was branded, takes advantage of the benefits of tableless web design, and includes a number of social networking tools.
The current iteration is version 3.x (in development) and is a major re-write of the program to incorporate an object-oriented backend, a template system to allow easy layout changes, and inclusion of an administration-area username and password definition during installation. The latest development version is 3.0.2, and was released on 6 August 2011.
Versions
There are currently two releases of OsCommerce. Versions 2.3 (stable) and 3.0 (in development) are developed as two independent programs, and as such do not share code. Contributions, the official name for the open-source community developed plugins, are developed for either 2.x or 3.0, and are incompatible with one another.
Branches
Distributed under the GNU General Public License, OsCommerce is one of the earliest PHP based Open Source shopping cart software distributions. As such, it has spawned a number of forks, such as Zen Cart (2003).
Publicised vulnerabilities
In August 2011 three vulnerabilities in version 2.2 of the OsCommerce system were exploited, allowing the addition of an iframe and JavaScript code to infect visitors to websites. Armorize reports this allowed infected web pages to hit 90,000 in a very short time until it was noticed and increasing further to 4.5 million pages within the space of a week. OsCommerce 2.3 was made available in November 2011 and patched the exploited security holes.