There it was in front of my eyes.  The headline in osCommerce's forum read, "Is OsC Dead?, Discussion of the Progress of OsC".  Despite how some may read the title, the thread isn't about bashing osCommerce.  Instead, it is about users and community members concerned and even fearful of the slow pace of new development for osCommerce.  Despite all the talk about osCommerce 3.0, it has been a year and a half since OsC 3 Alpha 4 was released with the roadmap showing that Alpha 5 and 6 are still under development.  How can one not ask if the future of osCommerce is in jeopardy?

As mentioned at the osCommerce forum, Kerry Watson also has an article out about the new breed of open source shopping carts.  The article starts off with a that was then, this is now statement regarding shopping carts.

While the Big Three of the old guard — osCommerce, Zen Cart, and CRE Loaded — continue to duke it out among themselves, new-generation open source commerce projects have begun to spring up with new ideas and new ways of thinking. Most noteworthy of the new crop are France-based Prestashop and US-based programs Ubercart and Magento.

These fresh Web 2.0-style carts are mature and production-ready contenders, and all are at or beyond version 1.0 in their production cycle. These carts are equal or superior to many commercial e-commerce programs, and are available for free under the GNU or OSL 3.0 Public License. We've previously reviewed Magento, so this column will focus on the other two next-generation carts: PrestaShop and Ubercart.

Personally, I've been working on recommending a friend to upgrade his osCommerce site to either Magento or Drupal's Ubercart.  Even when the 3.0 version of osCommerce is released, it will likely still not have many of the Web 2.0 features that the new breed of shopping carts currently have now.  It's not that I think osCommerce is dead, but I do think that osCommerce has stopped evolving.  Good open source projects never die, they just fade away.

A new version of my favorite shopping cart has been released.  Magento, an open source ecommerce platform, is now available under version 1.1.5.

This version includes many bug fixes for Magento 1.1.x that are listed in the release notes section.

This version also comes with new features:

• New category management tool that will allow store owners to manage a large number of categories, which can be tested on our demo admin site.
• New skin to the Magento Default theme which can be seen here

More information can be found at: http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/mage...

Magento 1.1 was released last week.  Magento is an open source ecommerce platform (shopping cart).  Several weeks ago, I discussed some of the expected features in Magento 1.1.  Be sure to check out the original announcement for more details on Magento 1.1.

The new version of Kentico CMS enables rapid development of on-line stores. It comes with new E-commerce starter site and step-by-step guide for ASP.NET developers.

The revamped E-commerce module now supports:

• Product and inventory management
• Shopping cart
• Customizable checkout process
• PayPal, Authorize.NET and custom payment gateways
• Product options and configuration (e.g. t-shirt sizes and colors)
• Wish list
• Configurable taxes, shipping and discounts
• Multiple currencies
• Easy integration into web site through built-in web parts
• Sales reports

 ... and other great features.

Download a free trial at http://www.kentico.com/ecommerce.aspx 

Roy Rubin over at Magento discussed what we can expect in the upcoming Magento 1.1.  On top of that list are performance improvements with as much as a 40% improvement in the catalog and sales modules.  Enhancements and new to Magento 1.1 will also include:

• Admin UI improvements: Changes will be made to only load data when necessary, improving the responsiveness of the Admin Panel.
• Web Services API: A highly requested feature which will make integrating Magento with 3rd party software much easier. The API will be added for the catalog, customers and sales modules.
• Virtual Products: These products which do not require shipping information and/or inventory management add to Magento’s product types.
• Customer Defined Product Options: This functionality will allow customers to define text, images, etc. for products.
• Bundled Products
• Improved support for EU and Canadian taxes: The tax rules and functionalities for EU and Canadian taxes will be added to the Core

For additional information along with a video, check out Roy Rubin's post.

The release of Ubercart 1.0 was announced earlier today.  Ubercart is an open source e-commerce package (shopping cart) that fully integrates your online store with the open source CMS, Drupal.  We've been watching Ubercart for some time and like some of the look-and-feel it borrows from osCommerce.

Some of the features in Ubercart 1.0 as reported by their shopping cart's Website include:

• Configurable product catalog includes catalog pages and a block to display product categories.
• Flexible product creation system. Create normal products by default. Add fields to store additional product information using Drupal's CCK system.
• Flexible product attributes system. Create user selectable attributes for your products that modify the price, SKU/model, and/or weight of items as the customer adds them to his or her cart. Set default attribute/option sets for each product class to easily create many similar products.

A tool for migrating your osCommerce site to Magento has been updated at Magento Connect.  For those of us that our osCommerce users looking for other options, this is exciting stuff.  The new version offers improvements in UTF8 conversion and product image importing.  This tool even has its very own wiki page.

Webdistortion, a web design studio in Northern Ireland, recently reviewed nine different e-commerce platforms. All nine platforms reviewed were open source software packages.

With e-commerce webdesign really starting to take off, its never been more important to choose a platform which suits you as a developer (i.e. one that you can support) and one that will provide your clients with the features that they need to run a successful online shop.

There are a number of ways of getting a shop online, and we’ve focused primarily on open source e-commerce platforms here.

Those nine e-commerce platforms under review include: osCommerce, ZenCart, VirtueMart (Joomla!/Mambo), Magento, DashCommerce, CubeCart, X-Cart, LiteCommerce, and Shopify. If you're looking for a brief and consolidated review of open source shopping carts, then the Webdistortion reivew is a nice place for you to visit.

For those curious, I found this story via DZone.