Seeking compliant catalog and shopping cart

redneck: This is where I am headed as well. I am unable to contribute yet but let me think about it. I have a feeling a whole lot of people may be interested in this.

Good, then I’ll keep watching this thread to see what happens.
By the way, I thought I might mention why I am using OSCommerce in the first place: among other features, what I like best is the well-designed and comprehensive administrative interface. A good admin interface is arguably one of the most important features of an online store solution, and yet in many cases it seems to have been an afterthought.
The OSCommerce admin interface is very good, with no significant Javascript dependencies.
I’d like to find something like that, though structured and compliant like WordPress.

Let me know when you find it.

Redneck: I’m guessing you’re doing this for a customer or for profit (since it’s a shopping cart). Why not ask the OS Commerce team / developers to improve it and offer to pay for it ? You may be in for a good surprise – perhaps someone’s even already done it or planning it.

Better still: Offer to improve theirs and get them to pay you. Let’s not lose sight of the ball! To be serious I hope that we can do this in a WP framework. Add multiple blogging and Wow! Matt will be Master of the Universe.

Well, I posted a question on the OSCommerce forums about CSS-compliant templates and was basically laughed at. I’m going to hack up an index.php file anyway and see how hard it is. But there are many files.
I think what got me to thinking about a different solution from OSCommerce was my impressions of the OSCommerce “community” vs the WordPress “community.” Even though the OSCommerce people should be more “serious,” since they are all in business by definition, I find I am not really that impressed with them, compared to the expertise I find here. Perhaps I am not fair, since I haven’t spent a lot of time there, but the more I thought about it the more I wished I could use something akin to WordPress for my shopping cart.
I’ll be implementing the OSCommerce stuff anyway, since I need to be taking orders in less than a month and I have already paid an OSCommerce consultant to help me get up to speed. But I am thinking further ahead.
I’ll post a link to my commercial site when it is ready, here or on my blog. Y’all will probably be pretty surpised when you see what my business really is.

Redneck, I attempted converting OSCommerce to have clean markup and search-engine optimized URIs. I got pretty far but the project fell through. It was a huge pain and I wouldn’t want to do it again.

I am just beginning to sketch out in my mind what functionality a catalogue has that WP does not. The answer is not much. Usual issues of tracking the customer, storing the selections and secure ordering and a few bits but really what is it? A few php calls and a tweak of the mysql. My gut feeling from allusion’s posts is that this may not be on the WP agenda for a while. There is however a formidable PHP community here and hopefully someone might start a hack.

This goes beyond a ‘hack’. For someone to run a business on it, it needs a number of serious modules, with a lot of security forethought, and integration with outside products…
Sounds like something someone could build a company around, but then again why isn’t there more of this already.. gotta wonder.. ?? It’s a lot of pieces to pull together, and there are tons of shopping cart, order, etc., systems out there, not to mention systems like Yahoo Shopping which package it all up for you neatly.
-d
https://www.chait.net

I did a little reasarch last night.
At least one OSCommerce user has started a support forum for losing the tables (most of them) and making OSCommerce more CSS compliant: https://forums.eeweb.nl/
This fellow has already developed a mostly table-free version of OSCommerce: https://forums.oscommerce.com/index.php?showtopic=71930
Some of the sites that use it look pretty clean: https://www2.voimaharjoittelu.net/
I believe very much in the best tool for the job. WordPress is not a catalog and shopping cart and it wouldn’t make sense to try to bend it into one (I’m making enough trouble for myself trying to turn it into a general-purpose CMS). On the other hand, it’s reasonable to extend the WordPress model of XHTML compliance and CSS use to other web applications.
OSCommerce is the best catalog/shopping cart application I have found (for my criteria). I think we can bend this towards a cleaner model.

It’s been almost a year now since this last post. I’m about to dive into the shopping cart deep end and I’d LOVE to integrate it with WordPress and ideally OSCommerce (or some other web-based shopping cart).

Any suggestions, links, theories, etc. welcome. I’ll post what I learn here.

– Bradley

Yes I agree. An integrated shopping cart plugin would be excellent!!!

If you don’t think its a good idea then don’t spoil it for those that do, go and post your negative vibes somewhere else ??

Mm… I wonder… Would you think a bounty to whoever makes the best shopping cart plugin during the wordpress plugin competition would make things happen more quickly? Maybe we could achieve this by setting up a dedicated paypal account.

According to the
oscommerce changelog, it was last updated in july 2003. Since then, the fork called ZenCart has been gaining a lot of momentum.

Hi,

i’m about to release a XHTML / CSS tableless oscommerce fork , called osCSS .
First public release will be out during May 2005 .
More info here : https://counteractdesign.com/blog/index.php/Oscss
Demo shop : https://counteractdesign.com/ms2css/product_info.php?products_id=19
Forum: https://counteractdesign.com/forum/index.php

all in french so far , we are looking for some serious translators