Checkout by Amazon is a complete e-commerce checkout solution that provides your customers with the same secure and trusted checkout experience available on Amazon.com today. It offers unique features including Amazon’s 1-Click®; and tools for businesses to manage shipping charges, sales tax, promotions, and post-sale activities including refunds, cancellations, and chargebacks.

You can now integrate Checkout by Amazon with your osCommerce based online store using the latest certified versions of our add-ons:

• Checkout by Amazon (for osCommerce Online Merchant v2.2MS2 and v2.2RC1)
• Checkout by Amazon 2.1 (for osCommerce Online Merchant v2.2RC2)

Free Processing Offer!

We are pleased to offer free payment processing through September 30, 2009 to businesses and organizations that begin accepting Amazon Payments using Checkout by Amazon and Amazon Simple Pay. If you haven’t signed up yet, learn more and sign up today. See details, terms and conditions of the offer here.

Free Webinar!

Checkout by Amazon: Inviting Amazon customers to shop on your site

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

In this webinar we will introduce you to Checkout by Amazon. We will talk about the important features of Checkout by Amazon and demonstrate the customer experience. We will also highlight how you can use our osCommerce add-ons to integrate with Checkout by Amazon. If you are a merchant, a solution provider or a developer working with merchants, this webinar is for you.

Register Now!

Feel free to contact us with questions/comments/feedback in our support channel on the osCommerce community support forums:

http://forums.oscommerce.com/index.php?showforum=72

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

Simply call 0800 358 9450 and quote osCommerce. (Terms and Conditions)

osCommerce V2.2RC2a comes with the PayPal modules as default payment options, including Website Payments Standard, Website Payments Pro (UK & US) and Express Checkout (as a stand alone option). These new modules can also be downloaded as Add-Ons for osCommerce merchants running version 2.2MS2 and above.

The new site will be rolled out in 3 stages with the first stage contemplating the existing contributions section. In addition, community members and developers can help clean the structure of add-on packages by reporting uploads to be removed.

The following changes are planned for the second and third stages of updating the new site:

2nd Stage Updates:

• register_globals compatibility flag for 2.2-RC1 and 2.2-Final installations
• Maintainers can assign their add-ons as public or private to allow or disallow additional uploads from other community members
• If an add-on is private, maintainers can assign other community members as maintainers who are allowed to upload files to the package

3rd Stage Updates:

• Allow maintainers to edit descriptions
• Allow maintainers to link their uploads to a forum topic (for support)
• Allow maintainers to upload screenshots of the add-on in action
• Allow maintainers to link to other add-ons as a “related” feature
• Allow community members to adopt an inactive add-on

The new community add-ons site can be reached at:

http://addons.oscommerce.com

We look forward to rolling out the additional features in the coming weeks and look forward to the additional suggestions the community has for improving the experience of finding, downloading, and contributing additional add-on packages.

This allows modules to be created to define new data parameters for a product which can easily be accessed via its module code.

Once a product attribute module has been installed via the Administration Tool (in the same manner payment and shipping modules are installed), its field is automatically added to the edit product page where the module controls the presentation of having its value defined.

This allows add-ons to be installed that add data fields to the product without the need to modify the edit product page in order to save the data in the database.

A minor change to the database class has also been performed to automatically bind the database table names in SQL queries which allows any database table to be accessed without the need to define it first in the includes/database_tables.php file. (This file will be removed in the 3.0 release)

Here is a short QuickTime movie showing the new Product Attributes feature with the following attribute modules:

1) Date Available (javascript controlled input field)
2) Manufacturer (pull down menu)
3) Shipping Availability (pull down menu)

osCommerce Online Merchant Product Attributes QuickTime Movie; 1.1MB

The product information page on the store front-end has also been updated to allow the dynamic product variant combination values to control certain data on the page, such as the product price and the product model.

osCommerce Online Merchant Product Info Page

The introduction of the new Product Attributes feature is currently defined for master products only, which product variants will use, and will be definable at the product variants level once the edit product page has been redesigned to handle the presentation of the data.