About a year ago I started updating osCommerce 2.3.1 with Mini Template with all the “belts and whistles” that I had accumulated over the past ten years. At the time my thought was to add a separate mobile package later to make this engine mobile ready. Well, a lot had changed in the last 11 months, and responsive is the only way to go.
This was not an easy decision as I really like Mini Template and its flexibility to server our marketing goals. But having a responsive engine far out weight marketing flexibility for now…well, until Mini Template goes responsive…
So you may share my frustration with osCommerce if you are in the online trenches and perhaps just don’t have the time and resources to wait or implement some of the good add-ons that should’ve been in the core engine. Thank goodness for Gary Burton and the osCommerce community for pushing out the responsive osCommerce fork. So in the last month I had forked Gary’s project and began incorporating what I thought was good add-ons to this responsive osCommerce fork. Hopefully, write once and use again by many?!
So here is a tally on what I had done so far, and please feel free to download, test, use and add to it…
- Header Tag SEO (you should know why this is needed).
- Ultimate SEO URL5 by FWR (yeah, I use Magento but I like the simplicity of OSC. Plus, it’s a good idea to keep all the indexed URLs the same. Is there a Magento hack out there that offers OSC style URLs?)
- Simple Registration that I hack up several years ago (for real, you want people to sign up and you are asking them for birthday, address, phone no. and etc.?)
- Facebook Login with the ability to re-request permission (this may becoming useless as Facebook is changing permission requirements, but for continuity sake for us.)
- Simplified checkout (from 3 to 2 pages, but 2 pages are still too long.)
Coupon Code & Gift Voucher (CCGV) is in the work. The thread that support this add-on is so dead, but I have been using this for 10 years now so I am my own thread. The CCGV was great for discount and coupon, but the real benefit was to be able to tweak it to offer online credit as well as cash back reward in the form of credit.
So here is my Github link: https://github.com/clustersolutions/osCommerce-234-bootstrap. Do contact me for any issues you may find. Let’s make this the best e-commerce engine built for store owners.