Can osCommerce 3.0 Compete with Magento?

By MXWest • July 3, 2009 • No Comments

I’ve Google’d here and there to see what’s been happening with osCommerce 3.0. Mostly nothing it would appear.

But recently I’ve seen some interesting – if tentative – signs of life. Seems the repository has been moved over to Github. Can the “social coding” encourage a growth of interest in osCommerce? See also the blip.tv presentation by none other than Harald Ponce De Leon himself: click here for the video.

The most recent code change is noted ” haraldpdl pushed to master at haraldpdl/oscommerce June 18, 2009″ at Harald’s Github profile. And 3 days ago we have evidence of Harald’s presence on the site.

In light of a recent post about a problem in Magento 1.3.2.1 (Magento 1.3.2.1 and Google Base), I began to wonder if the Magento community is in danger of becoming … a bit wobbly. The broken state of the Google Base implementation has me seriously worried about the state of Magento’s community edition. How did something so touted – Google Base – get broken? It was working. What is happening in the regression test phase that is allowing problems like this to escape undetected into a new release?

The Magento extension model puts it leagues ahead of osCommerce 2.2; its template model and theme-ing equally so. But is Harald onto something moving osCommerce out to the Github social coding model? Is that model more sustainable/ extensible than the Magento model?

Would we ultimately be better served by a software suite that included absolutely everything? That is, UPS, USPS, PayPal, CyberSource, Authorize.net, etc that be turned on or off by simplified configuration? Just turn on or off the features you do or don’t want. Isn’t that essentially what we have in Magento to begin with?

Developers could add feature after feature and you turn it on or off. Who cares about “bloat” if you’re not loading the code? Who cares about the size of a release – I’m routinely downloading software appliances that exceed 500MB. And with bandwidth considerations disappearing, code caching becoming smarter, elastic computing allowing on-demand additional resources and storage – well, storage is so huge, cheap available … who cares?

Maybe the eventual model is that commercial code is included in every release, and your store just “calls home” to pay for the features offered by that commercial code. Is it time for “freemium” models to be embedded in Open Source code? After all, the code is open, you can view it, see it and test it. And doesn’t PayPal get paid? And UPS?

There’s a viable model emerging.

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Categories: Tech, eCommerce, magento, osCommerce
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Magento 1.3.2.1 and Google Base

By MXWest • July 1, 2009 • 3 Comments

Introduction

Well, Google Base in Magento 1.3.2.1 Community Edition is broken. Word on the forum is that it will be fixed for 1.3.2.2. Here’s the error message I got:


Warning: Varien_Autoload::include(Zend/Gdata/Gbase/Extension/ItemEntry.php) [varien-autoload.include]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in lib/Varien/Autoload.php on line 93

Solution that Worked For Me

As always, YMMV and make sure you test. Anyway, here’s what I did to make it work for me. I edited the core file (gasp!) lib/Zend/Gdata/App.php . For reasons unknown to me, at around line 938, the Zend_Loader function has been commented out. I found this:

937
938
939
940
941

try {
    @#Zend_Loader::loadClass("${name}_${class}");
    $foundClassName = "${name}_${class}";
    break;
} catch (Zend_Exception $e) {

I removed the # from the line, and the resulting code now reads:

937
938
939
940
941

try {
    @Zend_Loader::loadClass("${name}_${class}");
    $foundClassName = "${name}_${class}";
    break;
} catch (Zend_Exception $e) {

Notes

Here’s where having excellent Attribute Sets for your products really pays off. Mapping as best you can to the Google Base attributes should really get you way ahead of the game.

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Categories: Tech, eCommerce, magento
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Importing My Magento Theme into CVS (Concurrent Versions System)

By MXWest • June 17, 2009 • No Comments

Introduction

I’m pretty much just adapting/ copying an old internal wiki entry out here. I’ve used CVS for years and years, but only once in a great while do I add whole new directories of source code. More typically, I’m simply adding a module or 2, so “cvs add” does the trick. So here it goes, so future me and current you have a quick and dirty reference going forward.

Importing Directories into CVS

If the directory in which your source code resides has never been in CVS at all, you’ll need to import it. Here I’m importing my new Magento theme into my repository.

cd /magento/app/design/frontend/MXWestInterface/MXWestTheme
cvs import -m "Imported sources" magento/app/design/frontend/MXWestInterface/MXWestTheme MAGENTO_1_3_2_1 MXWEST_1

Notice that I don’t have a leading / in my import command.

I don’t have any use (yet? ever?) for vendorTag (MAGENTO_1_3_2_1) or releaseTag (MXWEST_1) in my context, but CVS requires them – they must be present. For details about what they mean, click here for the CVS documentation.

Checking your Source Back Out

To work with the newly imported files, you’ll need to checkout the files you just imported. If you want a working copy in the same directory from which you just imported, you’ll need to (re)move the existing files first. I strongly recommend a backup!

cd /magento/app/design/frontend/MXWestInterface
tar cvf ~/myBackup.tar ./MXWestTheme # back me up to a tar bundle
rm -rf ./MXWestTheme # remove existing files
cvs co -d ./MXWestTheme magento/app/design/frontend/MXWestInterface/MXWestTheme # checkout a working copy

The -d specifies the destination directory. Otherwise you’ll end up with a lot of sub sub sub directories!

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Categories: Tech, eCommerce, magento
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Some Band Pictures from the Delran Relay For Life

By MXWest • June 8, 2009 • No Comments

A few pictures from May 29th, at the Delran Relay for Life. It was extremely hot and humid under the tent – I went through 1.5 liters of water – for each of 2 sets! We had a great time, and our team exceeded our fundraising goal.



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Categories: Family and Friends, Photos
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