On the RawSEO blog today Justin has posted five reasons why he thinks the OSCommerce e-commerce platform is a nightmare.

"The goal of the osCommerce project is to continually evolve by attracting a community that supports the ongoing development of the project at its core level and extensively through contributions to provide additional functionality to the already existing rich feature set." Why shouldn’t I use it?

Here's his five reasons:

• no separation of logic and presentation
• difficult to integrate into an existing design
• security
• cannot have multiple sizes of image previews
• admin navigation issues

He includes some other options, too, just to give you an idea of what else is out there.

On DevShed today there's a new tutorial posted looking at how to customize your osCommerce site's title tags to make things a bit more meaningful.

If you use osCommerce for your site's e-commerce, and you're not happy with the quality or quantity of visitors your site receives, keep reading. Though osCommerce provides some excellent features, its weaknesses could be getting in the way of giving you the number of visitors and conversions you expect. Fortunately, there's a solution, hidden in something as simple as a title tag.

The trick is in editing two files - the main index and a product info page - to add in a bit of PHP at the top that pulls out the matching category information for the item and pushes that into the $title variable for output.

Among other things mentioned in his his latest post Bill Staples talks about a new tool that makes the installation of lots of popular web apps (PHP and not) simpler - the Microsoft Web Application Installer.

The Microsoft Web Application Installer (Web AI) is a companion to Web PI, and provides a super easy way to download, install and configure many popular community and open source applications on IIS7. Available applications include DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti, osCommerce, PHPBB, and Wordpress, with more on the way.

You can find out more about this web installer and the Microsoft Platform tools from this page on Microsoft's site or in this Web AI forum (where you can also provide your own feedback).

There's an interesting post from Michael Kimsal over on his blog concerning an email he received from a developer over at metrofindings.com asking about the possible creation of something he called (tentatively) "Active Printers" (or "Active Formatter").

Just now I was looking at some crappy OSCommerce code, and deciding how to rip it up into a template system. And I'm talking with kyle, and the proverbial question comes up, do you give your template system objects, or strings. What if you gave it special "active record"-esque template objects. Active Printers... or something. Then you could work with everything in a consistent interface, escaping all content with htmlspecialchars if needed, etc etc. Looping through object data and making a table...

The email included a block of concept code of how he pictured it working - a pretty simple system really. Pushing data into the class and showing what tag(s) to style it with and have it "know" how to format it (like a phone number string). Michael asks his readers if they've seen something like this before.

Comments already made include discussions of things like xmlWriter, presentation and business logic, and the Savant templating library.

There's an interesting post from Michael Kimsal over on his blog concerning an email he received from a developer over at metrofindings.com asking about the possible creation of something he called (tentatively) "Active Printers" (or "Active Formatter").

Just now I was looking at some crappy OSCommerce code, and deciding how to rip it up into a template system. And I'm talking with kyle, and the proverbial question comes up, do you give your template system objects, or strings. What if you gave it special "active record"-esque template objects. Active Printers... or something. Then you could work with everything in a consistent interface, escaping all content with htmlspecialchars if needed, etc etc. Looping through object data and making a table...

The email included a block of concept code of how he pictured it working - a pretty simple system really. Pushing data into the class and showing what tag(s) to style it with and have it "know" how to format it (like a phone number string). Michael asks his readers if they've seen something like this before.

Comments already made include discussions of things like xmlWriter, presentation and business logic, and the Savant templating library.

On the High Performance PHP blog today, Justin Silverton has posted a few thoughts on why he thinks "oscommerce is a nightmare".

He quotes from the oscommerce.com site about what their goal for the software is and the methods they're working at to achieve those goals. Then comes his reasons for not wanting to use their software - five of them on differing subjects:

• no separation of logic and presentation
• difficult to integrate into an existing design
• security
• cannot have multiple sizes of image previews
• admin navigation issues

On the High Performance PHP blog today, Justin Silverton has posted a few thoughts on why he thinks "oscommerce is a nightmare".

He quotes from the oscommerce.com site about what their goal for the software is and the methods they're working at to achieve those goals. Then comes his reasons for not wanting to use their software - five of them on differing subjects:

• no separation of logic and presentation
• difficult to integrate into an existing design
• security
• cannot have multiple sizes of image previews
• admin navigation issues

Justin Silverton/i> has written up in this blog post the five reasons he sees not to use the popular OSCommerce E-Commerce software.