osCommerce Blog

In Germany we usually start to see Spekulatius in grocery stores around Christmas. This year seems to be different as Spekulatius has made an early appearance.

I’m not complaining about it - I just had to double check in my mind what month we were in. I ofcourse picked up a packet to buy

My acknowledgment that it was indeed too early for Spekulatius came at the checkout, where the cashier said “Wow, you can actually buy these now?”.

mmmmmm… Spekulatius dipped in coffee..

So, while I’m here enjoying some Spekulatius, I’m still hoping that the summer is not over just yet.

.. and what’s new on the development front? I’ve been doing some robot work of standardizing the framework and moving from the old tep_ function format towards the new osc_ namespace.

That isn’t just a simple search and replace one can do to rename tep_* functions to osc_* function names, as it would still be the same under the hood and wouldn’t warrant a milestone release to be made.

As an example, the general.php functions file has been slimmed down from ~48 functions to 18. The functions were either deprecated or moved to the new class definitions.

All html_output.php functions have been standardized, with the Catalog, Administration Tool, and Installation module all using the same file.

The address related functions have been moved to a new osC_Address class, and it is now actually possible to administrate the address formats. The format strings have been moved to the countries database table making it easier to administrate them.

This allows the address format to be very specific for the country it is assigned to. Examples here are European countries that add a country letter code in front of the post code (eg, D-54570 Kirchweiler, for Germany).

Nothing here can be shown in a movie though as the work being done is in the framework, which can all be seen over at the Development Site.

The 3.0 Alpha 3 release is also nearly ready and am looking forward to addressing features again for the Alpha 4 release.

mmmmm.. Spekulatius…