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osCommerce

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Old oscommerce upgrade to modern application


marta_tw

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Hi

 

We run an eshop on oscommerce dated 2006 - I don't know which version is this, but it's old and very, very modified with lots of sophisticated, custom modules. It so modified that it runs smoothly on PHP 5.6 :-) At this moment it seems impossible to develop it further - no professional software house wants to work on that code - it's old 'fashioned', not documented well, not modular nor scalable. The only advantage is - it's super fast - page generation time with caching on is only 0.2s. The problem is - we need to make step forward to have modern, modular and easy to develop code. What should we do now? I was thinking abt some modern solution like magento or presta, but it will take loooong months to develop all the modules we have in our current system.. Is there any chance to rewrite the core code of oscommerce to PHP7 on some framework? Has anyone tried to do that?

Btw we really thought magento was a way.. until I visited LOTS of magento eshops.. Has anyone seen a fast magento shop? Seriously, it's a joke.. even the newest version is ridicolously slow - I've no idea how people work on that in big eshops.

 

Any comments welcome!

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Ok somme people on this website has the habities to update your shop after analyse.

It's possible to upgrade your shop with the latest osc but  you need to take in consideration the price will be in consequence on time to do the job. Lot of days.

 

The second ways is to restart with the latest shop and import your product. In this case you need to explain that you need exactly..

 

The third way is to select another system, but it's like the second way.

 

About the other shop. If you choose Magento you need to have some knowledge to manage the software. It's not for a newsbies and some web company work with these shop but hasn't good knowledge. Becarefull on that and on their development experience.

 

After there is many other sofware but you need what you want and know exactly.


Regards
-----------------------------------------
Loïc

Contact me by skype for business
Contact me @gyakutsuki for an answer on the forum

 

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Thanks for the answer.

Please note - we have grown over the years to 150+ orders daily and need to walk the most professional path possible. Therefore we need to hire software house. The problem is - no one wants to touch our code. My question is if anyone managed to eg. rewrite the code to some framework (laravel, symphony etc.)? It's way easier to develop the code if it's on a framework - thats our experience for now.

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You can also use an erp like Odoo. I let you an email, after I let you decide if you wan modernize your code or go on other way.

In all case, it's better to follow the update than to let a software without upgrade. At the end you need to restart a project with all risk who can appear for the business.


Regards
-----------------------------------------
Loïc

Contact me by skype for business
Contact me @gyakutsuki for an answer on the forum

 

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@@marta_tw It would be a mistake to try to upgrade your shop. Even if it was done, the core code would be old code that has problems and you would forever be working on fixes. In the long-run it would be more costly than starting over with a new shop and re-installing the changes. Either way will not be a quick change, though starting over would be quicker based on your description.

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Like so many shopowners, you've gotten yourself into a bind by staying with an ancient version of the osC code, heavily customizing it, and updating for newer PHP versions. You have essentially forked your own product -- no one here is really going to be able to help you maintain it (at least, not without heavy cost), and while I'm sure you could find some independent developer to learn it and work on it, they'll charge you a lot of money to do this.

 

Magento is notorious for requiring a heavy duty server (expensive) to get decent performance. I have no experience with Presta and can't comment on it. You certainly can use the latest osCommerce (responsive version 2.3.4BS, not the standard 2.3.4, which is basically unsupported). It will require some database tweaking to move your store over to it, especially if your customizations have modified the database, but you should be able to salvage all your data. Depending on what you've done for customizations (custom code or use of add-ons?), some of that may no longer be necessary, some may have add-ons available, and some you'll have to re-create on the new code base. Of course, you've kept detailed records of all the changes you've made over the years, including why some add-on was installed or custom change made, right? That will make it much easier to add any missing functionality to osC 2.3.4BS.

 

My understanding is that there is no concerted effort being made to put osC on some standard framework. The downside of a framework is that it can easily end up greatly slowing down a site, as (I understand) happened to Magento. It may (or may not) be easier to maintain, depending on how well the code is written in the first place, so being frameworked by itself is not a cure-all. This is beginning to sound like the early debate between Assembly language programmers and users of high-level language compilers -- speed/compactness versus maintainability. In time, compilers improved to the point where there wasn't much difference in speed and size, leaving the better maintainability as the winning edge for compilers. At this time, frameworks are like early high level languages: easier to wrap your head around, yet producing bloated and slow code. Maybe that will improve over time (a C or Fortran compiler can afford to spend lots of time and effort optimizing, while a JIT compile for PHP can't do much).

 

osC 2.3.4BS works with PHP 5.6, and I understand it's just some minor tweaks to get it to run on PHP 7. I expect that with PHP 7 becoming more common, osC will soon be updated to use it out of the box. Of course, many add-ons are still fairly old code, and may need updating to run on PHP 7.

 

You certainly should take a look at osC 2.3.4BS before you decide to go to another platform. it will be some work to get all of your desired customizations moved over to the updated platform, but only you can decide if it's worth it. Please keep detailed records of the how and why of all changes, so it the future it won't be so painful to move up to the next osC release. As to what that will be, and when, only Harald knows (and he's not talking). There might be a responsive 2.3.5, it might be called 2.4, or there might even be 3.0 (likely to be highly incompatible with 2.x). The "community-supported" 2.3.4BS is being actively maintained and extended, but who knows how that will interact with the next official osC release.

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  • 2 months later...

When you say "mobile app", do you mean a mobile-enabled website (responsive), or do you mean an actual app that runs on a phone? If the former, osC 2.3.4BS Edge is the way to go (fresh installation, migrate the database over, install customizations). Rather than going through the effort of upgrading the old site with responsive code, just migrate over to the new version. If the latter, osC has nothing in the way of phone apps.

 

osC doesn't really have skins or themes like some other systems. Some of that can be done in CSS, but major structural and functional changes will require PHP coding changes. If you're lucky, some might be available as "add-ons". Beware of vendors offering "templates" to make your site look this way or that way. They vary widely in quality, and range from merely upgrading CSS to installing an old and heavily customized osC version that will lock you in to this vendor for life.

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