History of BitcommercePackage
Version 38
BitcommercePackage
A full featured e-commerce system with support for postgres, firebird, & mysql
Bitcommerce is a full fledged CMS combined with a full fledged e-commerce system.
Why Bitcommerce?
Why Bitcommerce?
Still Going Strong
Begun in 2005, Bitcommerce has seen over 1500 commits in the first 7 years of it's history.Open Source, as in Liberty and Freedom
Bitcommerce maintains the truest intent of GPL source, and has the entire source tree available on GitHubDigital Content, Meet E-Commerce
If you want to create a paywall for online digital content, Bitcommerce does this out of the box using groups from UsersPackage. Assign a group to product, and on purchase users will be placed in that group. Ad-hoc creation of users groups allows unlimited possibilities. Access to file downloads, wiki pages, photo galleries, and more can all be controlled by purchasing a product of your creation.Designed for modularity while retaining pristine source
Simply put, Zen-cart/OSCommerce mods suck in that they litter your file tree with files outside of the primary source tree. We have fixed this. Inherent design to allow for mutli-repository extensions integratedFulfillment support
Similar to shipping, and payment, you can create Your own custom modules to handle fulfillment integration with back end systems.Software Architecture for those who know what those words mean
The original OSCommerce and Zencart code bases are a beautiful mess. They are amazingly feature complete, and fairly well organized. And yet, the code is a sprawling mass of duplicate functions. We have implemented true Model classes in the top-level classes directory.DRY out the code base
The amount of duplicate code is shocking. The developers who wrote, and continue to maintain such coding practices should be ashamed. We have attempted to tame that beast by the creation of common_inc.php to collect the myriad of duplicate functions.MVC - Getting the Data out of the Controller, and the Controller out of the View
The biggest sin in the OSC/Zencart database is the rampant use of database queries while in the middle of dumping HTML output. Data models have been created in the classes directory and views have been moved to the page directory. There is still a lot of work to do here.Is it for me?
Bitcommerce has transacted tens of thousands of orders, and shipped products all over the globe. However, as the clean up is not complete, there are some rough edges. If you are a capable of writing a Zen-cart module, then you are more than capable of using it and cleaning up an issues you come across. If you an end-user with minimal technical skills, and are looking for an immaculate, turn-key application without issues, bitcommerce is not ready for you yet.Want code?
- Get the latest bitweaver - bitcommerce requires the latest bitweaver, and the get then clone (or submodule add) http://github.com/bitweaver/commerce.git at your bitweaver root.
History
The bitcommerce project is a large project, almost as large as bitweaver itself. It began as a fork of the Zencart E-Commerce application at version 1.2.5d. It was converted into a BitweaverPackage that installs into the framework like any other. The approach is just like the TikiWiki -> ReleaseZero -> ReleaseOne approach for bitweaver:- First, port the architecture and maintain functionality
- Second, expand functionality and greatly improve modularity.
Want to know more?
- See https://github.com/bitweaver/commerce/commits/master for details and current progress.
- Stop by IRC and chat with us in real-time
Current Status
- A few sites have it running in production and processing live transactions (that's real cash. woo!) If you want to see bitcommerce running on postgres in live production environment, buy something from Viovio.
- The schema is considered to be cooled, though a few small changes are still occuring. Any future schema changes will only be permitted with extreme need.
- MAIN TODO CHORE: Port everything in commerce/pages to php & smarty .tpl pairs. This is a lot of work, and very risky due to the high possibility regressive bug introduction. About 10 of 70 pages have been completed.