osCommerce

I registered on the English and German osCommerce forums back in February 2003 when I first got in contact with the project. I posted and answered questions and made some contributions to existing add-ons. Two years ago in December 2007, Harald asked me if I’d like to become an official team member which I gladly accepted. Since then I’ve been helping with the German and English documentation, the German language pack for osCommerce 3.0, as well as some small bug fixes here and there. Currently, I’m working on a wireframe for the front end layout of version 3.0.

During the last 2 years as a team member I participated in various discussions on Skype and on the internal mailing list, but I never met any of the other team members in person. This changed in December 2009 when after a long break of official meetings, the first osCommerce public meet-up took place in London on 11th.

In the early afternoon I met with Harald, Mark, Jan and Matthijs from the team before the official event and enjoyed various interesting talks about each person’s professional career and long experience in e-commerce as well as their participation in the project.

Later on we all went from Paddington to Oxford Circus to the official event by tube where I had a chance to talk to community members such as Gary Burton and Mark Samios, as well as Bruno Lévêque and Igor Schlumberger, the co-founders of another open source e-commerce project called Prestashop.

I had come to London together with my wife and therefore already left the meet-up around 8pm to spend the rest of the evening with my wife. We also took the chance to do some shopping and sight seeing the day before the meet-up. It was a great short trip and I really enjoyed the event!

I’m looking forward to meeting more community members at next spring’s 10 year osCommerce birthday celebration which will shortly be announced on our blogs and on Facebook. Stay tuned!

We had a fantastic meet-up in London last Friday – I’d like to thank everyone again for the great evening. It was great meeting with team members again and meeting community members around London for the first time!

I arrived in London on Wednesday and had a hotel in Paddington. The hotels here serve their purpose and Paddington is great for travelling to and from London Heathrow and for getting around Central London with the underground. I learned the hard way from my previous visit not to blindly trust hotel/restaurant public wifi networks (those two “AwEsOmE” messages from Twitter were not from me ) so this time my network traffic went through a secure OpenVPN connection.

I met with Mark Evans at his work office in Waterloo and spent the day catching up. I also showed him what I had been working on with visual changes to the Administration Tool, jQuery interactions, and the new Product Types feature. The new Product Types feature allows the checkout procedure to be streamlined and we came up with some interesting ideas to pursue.

We met again on Thursday in Paddington and spent the day coding. Mark worked on some bug fixes and I did some more work on the Product Types implementation. We used Mockingbird to come up with the following concepts on how the checkout procedure can be optimized:

Shopping Cart

Checkout Confirmation 1

Checkout Confirmation 2

The idea is to store all calculated shipping rates for the shopping cart (currently only the cheapest or selected rate is stored) and to select a payment method by default (this would be the first payment method in sort order). This would be displayed on the checkout confirmation page with changes occurring through javascript or page reloads if javascript is disabled.

Interesting concepts! I’ll be publishing more information on the new Product Types feature this week when the changes are committed to Github.

On Friday we met for Lunch in Paddington. Matthijs van der Vegte and Yolande arrived first. I came and shortly afterwards Mark, Nick Weisser, and Jan Zonjee arrived. It was great catching up and meeting Nick for the first time. Getting closer to 5pm we then made our way to Oxford Circus and to the Match Bar where the public meet-up was organized.

One of the first there was Gary Burton (burt) who has been involved in the community since the early days. I didn’t actually get an opportunity to speak to him until the end of the event. There’s just not enough time to be able to talk to everyone – one reason for choosing the Match Bar was due to their open seating arrangements which can get everyone involved in a discussion, unfortunately the high volume the music was playing at kept this down to one-on-one discussions.

It was also great to have Bruno Lévêque and Igor Schlumberger attend (the co-founders of Prestashop in France). We discussed how they operate and how Open Source Licenses are used with the work we do. We’ll be looking at organizing a public meet-up with them in France next year which will be of definite interest to both communities!

I enjoyed talking to Mark Samios (enigma1), Vadym Gurevych (Holbi), Stewart Christie (scchristie), and all who were there.

John Salter from Yubico also attended and managed to have a quick talk to him as he was leaving. He brought some Yubikeys to hand out – the remaining Yubikeys will be handed out to community members with a competition that will run once the add-on has been certified.

It was a successful meet-up, and was a great start of organizing more for next year.

At the end of the meet-up, going back to our hotels, I enjoyed one last drink with Jan and we talked about the Product Types implementation. He mentioned it would be a great way to support products needing a minimum quantity order, which the implementation is perfectly suited for. This brings total flexibility into the checkout procedure and am excited about the possibilities the community will provide through add-ons.

I flew back to Düsseldorf Airport on Saturday after visiting the German Christmas Market at Hyde Park and doing some shopping at Oxford Circus (I really love Hamley’s ).

Nick made some photos of the meet-up so keep an eye out for those!

We’re kickstarting our public meetings again with a meet-up in London on Friday 11th December 2009 at the Match Bar West End (Oxford Circus) from 5pm onwards. This will be a casual no-presentation meet-up to meet, mingle, and have a few drinks with store owners, developers, and enthusiasts part of our community located in and around London.

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!

Wow – what an event the Internet World Kongress 2005 was! The event created an opportunity for the German team members living in all 4 corners of Germany to meet up personally for the first time and all appreciate that this was made possible. We all had a great time and all enjoyed the time we were able to share with each other.

We all met at the hotel on Monday evening and after checking into our rooms we had an early glimpse as to how the stands were setup for the event and found our location to be perfect. After looking around and taking a group photo we head out to scour the city to find a comfortable place to share a few drinks in.

The first evening together was kept short to about midnight to get a good nights rest and to wake up early to have breakfast and to setup our stand. Myself and Matthijs still spent some time setting up the notebook Henri brought along with a preview of the MS3 release and cleaned up some bugs with the integration of the “You’ve Recently Visited” module Matthijs worked on into the latest version of the core framework.

The hotel room was great but unfortunately no free internet access (cable or wireless) was available. I brought along my PDA to keep in touch with my emails but hesitated to sign up with a T-Mobile Hotspot for being able to do so.

We had a fantastic start to Tuesday with a great breakfast and setup our stand afterwards. As Henri was able to drive to the event he brought along his 19″ TFT Monitor to use as a display and I brought along a nice looking background lit keyboard to use for the display presentation, which is always a nicer alternative to just a notebook on display. Our posters were hung on the wall behind us and our leaflets were placed nicely on the table for everyone to take. We also had a bowl of MnMs to lure in the visitors, which plays nice with our logo and the image used on the front page of the support site.

Raphael and Stefan were one of the first to present their speeches to an audience, and went to the presentations with Henri with Matthijs remaining at the stand. Raphael held a presentation on the advantages and disadvantages of Open Source software to commercial software and how osCommerce works as an Open Source solution, and Stefan held a presentation on his brewery shop and described the success he has had with using osCommerce. I video tapped both presentations and will be making them available for download in the near future. All presentations held ran for around 25 minutes with a 5 minute question and answers session at the end.

I spent the rest of the day with Matthijs at the stand and talked with the visitors and other exhibitors. A lot of contact was made and some were positively surprised to see our presence there in the sense of an Open Source based project mingling with a corporate business oriented exhibition. As we don’t see ourselves remaining a “SourceForge project” forever you can expect to see our presence increasing

Tuesday evening was a blast! Not only did we meet up with ex team member Jan Wildeboer, whose super hero powers found a perfect fit at Red Hat, we were also provided tickets by Penton and Getacom to attend the Online Star 2005 Web Awards party. I was actually the only one against going to it weighing in that that evening would be the last evening we would have to spend together and to talk about project related issues, however did not want to spoil the fun for everyone so we went and had a great time there.

There were no surprise winners at the awards which went by fairly quickly, and stayed at the party until around midnight. As we all headed back to the hotel, me, Matthijs, and Raphael decided to continue the night and looked around for places to drink at.

On our march through the city we found a place to play billiard in but unfortunately no appropriate drinks were available so we drank Red Bull to keep us alive and moved on after a few games to an arcade gallery. There we had some fun playing Outrun 2 together and afterwards a first person shooter for some harmless digital fun.

As our thirst was yet to be relinquished we walked what seemed to be kilometers in hope to reach a bar that we were told would still be open at that time of night that we could still drink in. We were relieved to see it still open when we reached it and had about 20 minutes time to share a last round of cocktails in.

We took a taxi back to the hotel and the driver confirmed that the city night life has slowly died in the past few years which explained why we couldn’t find a place to drink in that was still open, but it was a weekday which we did have understanding for

Me and Matthijs spent the rest of the early morning talking and had about an hours sleep before getting up again for breakfast and to attend our stand. Getting up wasn’t as bad as expected and were fit for the second day of the event

There seemed to be more people at the event on the second day compared to the first, and enjoyed the additional contacts that were made. Unfortunately the hotel could not find Henri’s TFT monitor we left in their locker room overnight and spent midday seeing what could be done about it. As it still remains unfound the hotels insurance plan will more than likely take care of it.

As myself and Matthijs were leaving that evening, we had to leave the event earlier in the afternoon to meet an appointment with a friend at a park cafe and to be at the airport on time for our flight back home. Henri, Raphael, and Stefan remained at the event for that second day who were also departing back home in the evening.

The flight back home was entertaining with myself and Matthijs singing children songs in English, for the fact that I was surprised he knew them at all

All in all the event was great, and meeting with the other team members was fantastic! We all had a lot of fun and look forward to the next possibility where we are all able to meet up again. We talked a lot about the future of the project and anticipate realizing the hard work done this year to make the project even bigger next year.

Photos of the event have been made available on our gallery page at:

http://www.oscommerce.com/community/galleries

Last week was a busy week making final preparations for the presentations in München on Tuesday and Wednesday. With having a booth at the Internet World Messe convention, we also get the opportunity to bring along booth babes so Matthijs will also come along to the event and will be travelling together with me and will be in charge of the booth.

Tomorrow we fly to München and meet up with Henri, Raphael, and Stefan (all German team members) in the evening, and are allowed first to prepare the booth on early Tuesday morning, a few hours before the event officially starts.

Posters for the booth have been made and leaflets are available that outlines the chocolate side of the project.

At the last public meeting in Belgium we handed out t-shirts and this time we’re handing out leaflets – 1,000 to be exact!

Raphael and Stefan have an early start with their presentations, with Raphael being one of the first to give his presentation on the advantages of Open Source based e-commerce solutions over commercial solutions, and Stefan will give his presentation after the coffee break on describing how osCommerce has helped with the success of his e-business ventures.

I’ll be filming the event for a first time and will look at providing a video that can be downloaded. I don’t know when this can be made available due to catching up on work that is put on hold for the week, but will be sure to put something acceptable together within a short period of time.

Matthijs is at this minute finalizing his you’ve recently visited module and will be showcased with the pre MS3 presentation at the booth on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Everything is just about organized with a few last minute items being taken care of in the morning. The feeling is getting more excited and will definitely sky rocket as soon as we’re in the plane and arrive in München.

We’re all looking forward with meeting one another and also looking forward in reporting how the event goes later this week!