[osCommerce News]

I’ve just made the support site updates live and am proud of the results now that the network of support sites have a nice consistent look to them.


The osCommerce logo also went under the knife to finally have a nice looking vector based image that can be safely used for the marketing to be done when 2.2 is ready.


One of the major changes that are now in place is with the contributions section, with file uploads now requiring a user profile account that is created on the forums.


It’s quite funny that we’re back to this, as in the early years of the projects life cycle we had a login form for all of the community related pages on the support site. This was later changed where no login or account was needed, to make it easier for new comers to start contributing to the project.


The return of a login requirement is needed to make it possible to increase the awareness of contributors in the community, as promised earlier. This will be started in the coming days with an icon being shown in ones community profile that links to the contributions they have made, and will be extended in the near future to offer further statistics and possibilities.


What’s needed now is a “Claim Your Contribution” initiative, which will be started later this week.


The work involved with the login requirement will be added to the 2.2 Milestone 4 release that takes care of my (internal) workboard entry of making the login system flexible, to share an existing database with the store and to use an external authentication source.


The login system now in place for the contributions section connects externally to the InvisionBoard forum database, and performs a full authentication check of auto-login and password matching, and checks the access rights through temporary suspensions, permanent bans, and disallowed filters (ip addresses, usernames, and email addresses).


Such a feature would not be of interest to store only sites, however is of importance when a store is to be integrated into an already existing site, for example a CMS system, where members already exist.


The support site changes will be officially announced tomorrow, and am glad the related tasks are finalized as it definitely has lightened the workload myself and the team have.


Seeing the team progress along nicely too with the forums, documentation, and live shop entries shows how aggressive we are to complete the current milestone path Good work to everyone involved!





Link to Article: http://blogs.oscomme...he-superheroes/