osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 and PHP 5

The PHP Group recently announced that support for PHP 4 will be discontinued at the end of this year to focus on the production-ready PHP 5 and the upcoming PHP 6 releases.

The announcement from the PHP Group can be read here:

http://www.php.net/index.php#2007-07-13-1

This announcement impacts our current v3.0 development roadmap, our vision for the final v3.0 release, and our support policy for released versions, where we have decided to also drop support for PHP 4 in osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 and to optimize it for PHP 5.

This gives us v3.0 Alpha 5 and v3.0 Alpha 6 to remove PHP 4 compatibility coding logic and to optimize the framework with the new features PHP 5 provides. As the current state of the v3.0 framework has already moved to an Object Oriented design, optimizing it for PHP 5 will be a simple task worth doing now to avoid jumping to v4.0 so soon which was planned to be PHP 5 optimized.

Optimizing osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 for PHP 5 now allows us to further improve and strengthen the framework and to pass the high quality level of coding to community developers to base their add-ons on. The performance of the framework will improve by removing the PHP 4 compatibility layer and by taking advantage of the new features PHP 5 provides such as SimpleXML, DateTime, Iterators, and new core functions. The design and security of the Object Oriented framework will also improve by utilizing the new features of the PHP 5 Object Model.

Our support policy for the v3.x release series is to publish a release with new features every 6 months and to support each published release for 2 years. Removing the PHP 4 compatibility layer now for the v3.0 release allows us to focus only on PHP 5 without the need to spend resources on PHP 4 compatibility past its end of life cycle.

Many hosting providers have been supporting PHP 5 in recent years together with PHP 4 where this change will not impact many users. The number of providers supporting PHP 5 will increase by the end of the year to match the end of life support for PHP 4.

The osCommerce Online Merchant v2.x release series will continue to be compatible with PHP 3, PHP 4, and PHP 5 from v2.2 onwards.

We are highly motivated about this change in focus and look forward in making osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 an even better release.

This announcement can be discussed on the community support forums at:

http://forums.oscommerce.com/index.php?showtopic=270025

Posted by admin 18.Sep.07 News Read more Comments (0)

osCommerce Online Merchant v2.2 RC1 Released

We are proud to announce an advancement of the osCommerce 2.2 release cycle with a new release titled osCommerce Online Merchant v2.2 Release Candidate 1. This is primarily a bug fix release for the 2.2 series and will be the last release made before the 2.2 release series is finalized. We are currently in the process of certifying the payment modules included in this release which will be the only change for the final osCommerce Online Merchant v2.2 release planned in the coming weeks.

No major features have been introduced with this release candidate as our development efforts are focused on our upcoming 3.0 release, but does include the following changes:

* Over 25 bug fixes and improvements
* register_globals compatibility for PHP 4.3+ servers
* Visa PCI conformance of accepting credit card information on the checkout confirmation page
* Public titles for payment modules so the name of the payment service provider is not used as a payment method
* Maximum number of product quantities that can be added to the shopping cart (by default 99)
* New login routine for the Administration Tool
* New summary modules to display on the Administration Tool index page
* New web-based installation routine (backported from 3.0)

This release candidate also introduces a new name for the solution titled “osCommerce Online Merchant” that strengthens our presence and marketing efforts for our upcoming releases.

osCommerce Online Merchant v2.2 Release Candidate 1 can be downloaded here:

http://www.oscommerce.com/redirect.php/go,41 (hosted at Sunsite.dk)

An upgrade guide for existing osCommerce 2.2 Milestone 2 060817 installations can be found here:

http://www.oscommerce.com/ext/osc22rc1_upgrade.html.zip

This announcement can be discussed on the community support forums at:

http://forums.oscommerce.com/index.php?showtopic=268335

We wish you the best of fun with this release and look forward to your feedback!

Posted by admin 18.Sep.07 News Read more Comments (0)

osCommerce 3.0 Alpha 4 “Lebkuchen” Released

We are proud to announce the fourth alpha release in the osCommerce 3.0 development cycle and it is now available for general public testing. osCommerce 3.0 Alpha 4 “Lebkuchen” is the second release to be made available to the public, where the first two alpha releases were made available to Community Sponsors only.

Alpha releases are made to showcase the new features being worked on and to generalize a version specific for testing to help fix and improve subsequent alpha releases for a final, stable, secure, and production ready 3.0 release.

Although we strive to keep alpha releases stable, the primary intentions of making alpha releases publicly available are for testing purposes only. The framework for 3.0 is still under development and will change in subsequent alpha releases. No upgrade paths will be provided between alpha releases and are therefore not recommended for production use.

Some of the new features that are made available in this release include:

* New object-oriented framework (alpha 1)
* New installation routine (alpha 1)
* register_globals and magic_quotes_gpc compatibility (alpha 1)
* New template structure implementation (alpha 1)
* Search-engine optimizations (alpha 1)
* Service modules (alpha 1)
* Checkout procedure cleanup (alpha 2)
* New language definitions implementation (alpha 2)
* Updated payment modules with post-transaction actions (alpha 3)
* Catalog front-end, administration tool, and installation routine combined (alpha 3)
* XHTML/CSS based default template layout for the catalog side (alpha 3)
* Multiple product images implementation (alpha 3)
* New action modules (alpha 3)
* Administration Tool access levels (alpha 4)
* Administrator Log (alpha 4)
* Administration Tool batch action capabilities (alpha 4)
* HTML Editor for product descriptions (alpha 4)
* Full zone entries for most countries (alpha 4; Anders Pamdal)
* Language injection feature for similar languages (alpha 4)
* GeoIP Modules for the Administration Tool Who’s Online section (alpha 4)
* … and more! (application_top.php has never been so clean!)

The full list of changes to reported issues that occurred during development of the release can be seen here:

http://svn.oscommerce.com/jira/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10000&styleName=Html&version=10002

The full osCommerce 3.0 roadmap can be seen here:

http://svn.oscommerce.com/jira/browse/OSC

We’d like to specially thank the following community members for extensively helping out in testing this release:

Anders Pamdal (Tech2000)

The osCommerce 3.0 Alpha 4 “Lebkuchen” release can be downloaded here:

http://www.oscommerce.com/redirect.php/go,38 (hosted at Sunsite.dk)

We welcome all public interest in testing development alpha releases to help further improve the 3.0 release. All development activity can be seen at the osCommerce Development Site here:

http://svn.oscommerce.com

If you experience problems with this release, please create a new ticket at the Development Site with the relevant information. Discussions regarding the development of osCommerce are held in the osCommerce Development channels on the Community Support forums:

http://forums.oscommerce.com/index.php?showforum=43

We wish you the best of fun with testing this release, and look forward to your feedback!

This announcement can be discussed on the community support forums at:

http://forums.oscommerce.com/index.php?showtopic=257053

Posted by admin 18.Sep.07 News Read more Comments (0)

osCommerce 2.2 Milestone 2 060817 Update Released

An update to the osCommerce 2.2 Milestone 2 version has been released that addresses security related issues and bug reports that exist in the released version.

It is recommended for osCommerce 2.2 Milestone 2 store owners to apply the changes to their installations due to the security issues and bug reports that have been fixed. The changes involved are minimal, do not break compatibility with contributions, and further strengthens the security of the shop installation.

This update release focuses solely on security related issues and bug reports, and does not introduce any new features that have been made for the next development milestone release.

This release is a full release package containing updated source files (including the updates from the 051113 Update release), documentation, and information on what changes have been made to easily apply to existing installations.

This update release includes the following changes:

* Magic Quotes Compatibility Layer Fix
* Parse GET Variables In Cache Functions
* PHP 3 Session ID XSS Issue
* Product Attributes SQL Injection
* Resize Images To Round Numbers
* Use The Correct Country Name Value When Formatting Addresses
* Prevent The Session ID Being Passed In Tell-A-Friend E-Mails
* Properly Remove Deleted Products That Exist In Shopping Carts

The documented changes found inside the download package can be seen here:

http://www.oscommerce.com/ext/update-20060817.html

The 2.2 Milestone 2 060817 Update release involves the following file changes for the security and bug fixes made:

catalog/admin/includes/functions/compatibility.php (2 diffs)
catalog/admin/includes/functions/general.php (1 diff)

catalog/includes/classes/sessions.php (1 diff)
catalog/includes/classes/shopping_cart.php (2 diffs)
catalog/includes/functions/cache.php (4 diffs)
catalog/includes/functions/compatibility.php (2 diffs)
catalog/includes/functions/general.php (2 diffs)
catalog/includes/functions/html_output.php (1 diff)
catalog/shopping_cart.php (1 diff)
catalog/tell_a_friend.php (2 diffs)

We’d like to thank James Bercegay from GulfTech Security Research (http://www.gulftech.org) for bringing security issues to our attention.

This update release can be downloaded from:

http://www.oscommerce.com/solutions/downloads

This announcement can be discussed on the community support forums at:

http://forums.oscommerce.com/index.php?showtopic=223556

Posted by admin 18.Sep.07 News Read more Comments (0)