osCommerce

Amazon Payments is proud to be a Corporate Sponsor of osCommerce! We look forward to enhancing the Checkout by Amazon solution with the osCommerce community for an even better customer buying and store owner selling experience.

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

The database schema for osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 has been updated to include foreign key relationships between related tables. This update allows MySQL to natively support foreign keys on InnoDB databases that are directly defined in the database schema, and uses a fallback mechanism for MyISAM databases where foreign key relationships are defined in a database table.

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

Together with the osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 Alpha 5 release, we have migrated the development repository from a centralized Subversion server to decentralized Git repositories. This replaces the need to access a central server, and requiring the permissions to do so, to allowing you to instantly clone or fork the official development repository to your local development machine. This gives you the complete history of the repository on your local machine where you can start committing your changes to and to share them with others.

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!

osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 Alpha 5 introduces a strict level of error reporting directly in the core framework. This is performed by setting the PHP error reporting setting to E_ALL and by setting the MySQL sql_mode to STRICT_ALL_TABLES at runtime.

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.

According to the New York Times

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