With owning the trademark registration, the firm, comprised of members that were active and are known to many on our community support forums, contacted a number of our former team members, Corporate Sponsors, and community members and gave a deadline of 4 days to respond to handing over domains, ceasing any business relationships with us, and to replace links pointing to our website with theirs.

With the help of the Free Software Foundation Europe / Freedom Task Force of seeking legal aid in the United Kingdom, we appointed Beck Greener as our legal counsel and started legal proceedings against the firm.

As this not only affected our community of store owners and developers but also how Open Source projects and solutions operate, we decided to be open on this issue and to keep the community informed of every step we were taking.

Before our legal counsel could send the first letter, the firm had informally sent us a proposal to quickly resolve the issue of agreeing to let them continue owning the trademark registration and assured its use for SEO purposes only.

As we could obviously not agree to those terms, our legal counsel formerly replied with our demands that were successfully used as a base to later settle out of court.

This included ceasing usage of the osCommerce name, ceasing further distribution of their software and add-ons infringing on our copyright, and to surrender the trademark they had registered.

The support given by the community during this course was truly amazing. We’d like to thank everyone here and in international communities for their support and are immensely proud to have such a caring community! Thank you for being part of it!

Attending osCommerce team members and associates include:

Harald Ponce de Leon
Nick Weisser
Mark Evans
Matthijs van der Vegte

If you would like to meet us and other community members in person, please confirm your attendance at our Facebook page event here:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=166087012682

Please note that this bar requires a minimum age of 18 to enter. Some shared selections will be available to snack on. Those attending will need to pay for their own drink and additional food orders.

Date and Time:

Friday 11th December 2009 from 5pm onwards

Location:

Match Bar West End
37-38 Margaret Street
London W1G 0JF
Nearest Tube: Oxford Circus
Website: http://www.matchbar.com/match_bar_westend.php

We look forward to meeting you!

http://www.ipo.gov.uk/tm/t-find/t-find-number?detailsrequested=C&trademark=2512693

This is a continued effort of a derivative group titled “The New osCommerce Project” (now “The osCommerce Project”) to try and take over and own the success of osCommerce which we all have, as a community, worked hard on in the past 9 years since the start of osCommerce in March 2000.

This is being addressed legally and are confident that we will prevail in defending and protecting our rights.

If you have been addressed by eCommerce Ventures Ltd concerning their registration of the “osCommerce” Trademark, please contact legal@oscommerce.com and forward the relevant communication means you were contacted with.

A topic on our community support forums exists where you can provide support and feedback:

http://forums.oscommerce.com/index.php?showtopic=343171

We will keep the community officially informed of our legal defense through our blogs and newsletter.

Thank you for all of your continued support!

The maintenance of the server hosting the community support forums also affects the add-ons site where developers will have to wait until the server is back online to be able to upload their add-ons again.

This blogging entry will be updated with further information during the maintenance period.

Update:

The maintenance of the server has completed successfully and is back online in full operation.

Foreign key relationships allows records to be linked together through multiple database tables, for example, linking products to categories. Until now, when a product was to be deleted using the Administration Tool, extra PHP code had to be written within the delete function to also delete entries in other database tables that shared a relationship with the product being deleted.

This is fine for standard installations where the relationships between database tables are known, however when add-ons create new database tables during installation, changes were required in core source code files to also perform database actions on the tables they created.

Now with foreign key relationships, changes to core source code files are no longer required and changes to the related database tables are performed natively on InnoDB databases or automatically through the database class for MyISAM databases. This cleans the codebase considerably and allows one simple query to take care of the whole database. For example:

delete from osc_products where products_id = 1

This one simple query now automatically takes care of deleting the product language definitions, product reviews, category assignments, special prices, shopping cart entries, and any other product table relationships without any additional queries or PHP code necessary.

The following foreign key constraints are supported for MyISAM databases for both ON UPDATE and ON DELETE operations:

• CASCADE, automatically update or delete child records when a parent record is being updated or deleted (eg, delete all product related information when a product is being deleted)
• SET NULL, automatically sets the child record field value to null when a parent record is being updated or deleted (eg, clear the product manufacturer value when a manufacturer is being deleted)
• RESTRICT, prevents a parent record from being updated or deleted if child records depend on it (eg, don’t allow order status levels to be deleted if they are in use by orders)

Add-On developers can take advantage of foreign keys by defining relationships directly in the database schema for InnoDB databases, and by entering relationships in the osc_fk_relationships table for MyISAM databases. Examples of foreign keys defined in the osc_fk_relationships table are:

The osc_fk_relationships table is only used for MyISAM databases and is used by the database class to check on the defined constraints when UPDATE and DELETE queries are being performed.

There are currently 68 foreign key relationships defined that will be introduced in the osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 Beta 1 release.

The changes are currently available in my development branch at GitHub and will be pushed to the main development branch after further testing and code clean up has been performed. My branch is available at:

http://github.com/haraldpdl/oscommerce/

Documentation on MySQL’s foreign key implementation can be found here:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/innodb-foreign-key-constraints.html

The official Git development repository is hosted on Github where developers can network with each other and share the changes they have made.

A screencast presentation is available to show you how easy it is to fork the official repository to make your changes to, and how these changes can be merged back to the official repository.

This is our first screencast presentation and look forward to your feedback. Have fun!

All warnings and errors are logged in a text file located in the “work” directory and can be easily viewed in the Administration Tool -> Tools -> Error Log application and summary module.

This is the only Administration Tool application where it’s a good sign when it doesn’t show anything. It gives a nice feeling knowing that any sort of warning or error in the core framework has been checked for, from uninitialized PHP variables to problems with MySQL queries.

Setting the error reporting at such strict levels ensures a high quality of coding standards is kept in the core framework and passes this along to add-ons that are developed and installed.

This makes it easier for developers working on addons where they can see where warnings and errors are occuring in what they have been working on, and motivates them to fix the problems to improve the quality of the finalized work.

A configuration parameter will be introduced in v3.0 Beta 1 to disable the output of PHP warnings and errors on the catalog frontend. This allows the output of warnings and errors to occur under development environments, and to be disabled on production servers.

Twitter is one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet

with 25 million users already. Some osCommerce team members are also actively using Twitter to update others on what they’re currently doing and working on. Although it’s not always of general interest what others might be eating or drinking, I personally find it very inspiring to see what Harald is working on and to know it before everyone else does.

On our new Social Network Section you can see what the osCommerce team members are currently up to and you are welcome to follow them on Twitter. If you prefer to not drown yourself in too much information or think that your privacy is more important than following the social web trends and rather get the occasional news message, you can just subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed

The osCommerce team page has also been updated with links to the members’ Twitter profiles.

There are yet two other platforms where you can connect with the osCommerce project which you might not have been aware of:

• osCommerce Group on XING
• osCommerce Group on Facebook

Both PHP and MySQL highly recommend the use of the newer mysqli extension over the older mysql extension.

It’s been reported that there are still service providers using MySQL v5.0.67. This is actually fine as it is a much newer version than the minimum requirement of v5.0.7.

To clarify the MySQL versioning scheme, the third number in the version string (”7″) is incremented for each new release in the release level.

MySQL v5.0.7 was actually a beta released on the 15th June 2005, and v5.0.67 was released on the 8th August 2008.

There have also been some reports that some service providers are still using PHP v5.1.6. RedHat Enterprise Linux and CentOS are vendors still using PHP v5.1.6. This is unfortunate as it does not meet the minimum PHP v5.2.0 requirement to install and use osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 Alpha 5.

PHP v5.2.0 was released on the 2nd November 2006.

The first reports of v3.0 Alpha 5 not running properly was due to the use of PHP v5.1.6 which does not contain the json_encode() function introduced in PHP v5.2.0. This function is used heavily in the Administration Tool with the new dynamic table listing and live search features.

A compatibility function exists that might be the saviour to the json_encode() problem for earlier PHP v5.X versions. If you are interested in testing this out, feel free to fork osCommerce on Github and report back of your findings.

Our focus has changed with this release from implementing additional features into the core to concentrating on the framework and to add the features to future releases. This allows v3.0 to be released sooner with a stable framework, and allows a much faster release cycle for new features compared to the previous “release every 6 months” release strategy.

This release is a stable production-ready release and will be the first supported release in the v3.x series. This release is still marked as an Alpha release due to framework changes that are still planned. We therefore recommend the installation of this release to those that are performing it themselves, and for hosting and service providers to wait until the final release of v3.0 before making it available to their customers.

The community add-ons site will be accepting uploads for this release and discussion channels will be available on the community support forums.

The v2.2 -> v3.0 Alpha 5 migration tool will be made available by the end of March for existing installations to use, and is only recommended to those that will be updating their installations leading up to the final v3.0 release.

The roadmap for v3.0 is now:

v3.0 Alpha 5

• Product Attributes Implementation
• Dynamic Table Listings (Administration Tool)
• Live Search (Administration Tool)
• Administration Tool sections now self-contained Applications
• Error Logging; both PHP and MySQL errors and warnings now logged (forced runtime usage of PHP E_ALL and MySQL STRICT_ALL_TABLES)
• Stabilized Framework
• Usage of JSON for RPC calls
• Inclusion of jQuery v1.3.2 and jQuery UI v1.6rc6

v3.0 Beta 1

• HTML E-Mails
• Purchase Without Account
• Frozen Framework
• Updated Frontend/GUI
• Upgrade from v2.2 and v3.0 Alpha 5

v3.0

• Bugfixes
• Finalize Updated Frontend/GUI
• Documentation
• Certified Modules
• Upgrade from v2.2 and v3.0 Beta 1

v3.1

• Backup/Import/Export Features

v3.2

• Gift Vouchers and Coupons

The v3.0 Alpha 5 release will also be the first osCommerce Online Merchant release using Git to attract an even greater wave of developers to help with add-ons and core framework improvements. Git is a distributed version control system which allows developers to clone and create branches on their own local development machines. A discussion channel will be made available on the community support forums to manage the discussions on clones, patches, and keeping up to date with everyones changes.

The Git development repository is hosted at:

http://github.com/osCommerce/oscommerce/

Developers, feel free to fork the git master branch now and keep up to date with the commits leading up to the release. Be ready to show the world your creativity in making osCommerce Online Merchant an even better e-commerce solution