OsCommerce (styled "osCommerce" - "open source Commerce") is an

e-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) refers to commercial activities including the electronic buying or selling products and services which are conducted on online platforms or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile co ...

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

solution. It can be used on any

web server A web server is computer software and underlying Computer hardware, hardware that accepts requests via Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, co ...

that has PHP and

MySQL MySQL () is an Open-source software, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A rel ...

installed. It is available as

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

History

OsCommerce was started in March 2000 in Germany by Harald Ponce de Leon. The open source project was known as ''The Exchange Project''. In its infancy, osCommerce was referred to by Ponce de Leon as "a side thing" and "an example research study". By late 2001, a team formed for its development and in the words of Harald Ponce de Leon, this was the point the team started taking the project seriously. By 2005, over 2000 websites used osCommerce, and in 2009 this amount grew to 13,000. As of January 2024, BuiltWith reported 39,734 currently live sites using osCommerce. In 2021, the Holbi Group purchased osCommerce from Ponce De Leon and announced their intention to create 4.x. Its release was eventually scheduled for March 2022, however it was delayed due to the

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. On 16 November 2021, osCommerce v4 Beta 1 was released to the limited number of Beta testers osCommerce v4 Beta 2 was released on 26 January 2022 to multiple Beta testers osCommerce v4 Public demo was released on 1 June 2022 osCommerce v4 was released as a free shopping cart and open source Ecommerce platform on 25 July 2022 Major differences from the old versions was the use of the latest server software, separation of code and design, osCommerce App Shop and Apps (free and paid), introduction of multiple sale channels, multiple design templates, built in WYSIWYG editor.

Official Version

The current version is 4.0. Previous versions and Add Ons for them were removed from osCommerce.com as they were made obsolete.

Branches

Distributed under the

, osCommerce is one of the earliest PHP based Open Source shopping cart software distributions. It inspired the creation of many other online store platforms, such as Magento. It has also spawned a number of

forks In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from 'pitchfork') is a Eating utensil, utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tine (structural), tines with whic ...

, such as Zen Cart, xt:Commerce, oscMAX and Phoenix.

Publicised vulnerabilities (old versions)

In August 2011 three vulnerabilities in version 2.2 of the osCommerce system were exploited, allowing the addition of an iframe and JavaScript code to infect visitors to websites. Armorize reports this allowed infected web pages to hit 90,000 in a very short time until it was noticed and increasing further to 4.5 million pages within the space of a week. OsCommerce 2.3 was made available in November 2011 and patched the exploited security holes. When the demand for a responsive version of osCommerce 2.3 increased, community members took it upon themselves to develop one. Often referred to as osCommerce 2.3 (BS), it later evolved into a fork called Phoenix Cart.

References

External links

OsCommerce
{{DEFAULTSORT:Oscommerce Free e-commerce software Free software programmed in PHP Content management systems 2000 establishments in Germany 2000 software