osCommerce Usage Poll at osC University

[Nimitz_1061]

I am establishing a school site which will support all branches of osCommerce without bias.

One of our initial activities is to begin conducting polls aimed at getting some rough idea of where to focus our resources.

Please help in this effort by voting in our poll at:

osCommerce Usage Poll

I would appreciate it if members would share this link with acquantainces so that we could get a healthy response.

Regards,

David

David M. Graham
oscommerceuniversity.com

[met00]

not that I don't want to participate, but my big question is, why another forum?

I already have to follow and participate in the standard osc forum, and I follow and participate in this forum. Now you have created another forum. For what purpose? Do you think Lane (active on the OSC forums) and/or I (active here) really have the time to work yet another forum?

People are here because they have found osCMax and they have installed it, or are considering installing it. They like the work that has been done to integrate all the modules that they want to start with (much like the old Loaded V of pre-ms2 days) and they need some help integrating new modules that have been put on the stock OSC into their osCMax store.

Besides more "noise" on things like creloaded (bloatware) and zencart (not OSC) just what does your forum offer that can't be found in the two current forums I follow and contribute to?

I do wish you the best of luck on the new forum, but unless you can offer a compelling reason for people lake Lane and I to join, you're going to have a hard time building a community.

[michael_s]

Just a little note about this forum: it was originally created because the osCommerce forum wouldn't allow discussion about osCMax or osCDox

We tried to keep everything under their flagship, but they didn't want us.

Carry on!

[met00]

and that's one reason I'm here and not there as much.

their loss was your gain.

[Nimitz_1061]

I would like to thank both of you, for very cogent responses.

Met00, I don't intend the forum there to replace or compete with this one, or any other. I intend it to complement them, and to support our educational mission.

I also intend to use it to take up the serious slack in the community left by the trunk projects failure to recognize the various forks and branches. To this end, I actually have TWO forum sites on the University. One for students, and one for faculty members. The latter will be open to community members who chose to participate in conducting educational activities related to their distribution of choice as instructors.

The student lounge will serve as a place where questions unanswered anywhere else can be brought to the attention of fellow students and any roving faculty member who happens to wander through. With faculty members who, like Michael, remember why they ended up diverging from osCommerce and understand that business may be driven by acrimony but cannot be built upon it we can drive Open Source ecommerce forward as THE way to go.

I myself intend to do my best to keep up with 6 sets of forums, and route people towards the best resources available to help them with their issue.

David

[met00]

here is an example of the problem I deal with...

Can You Keep (Private) Notes In An Order? - osCommerce Community Support Forums

so I resolved this and at the end of my solution I added a cute idea that I call followup... Which I then actually added to the BIA Solutions version of osCMax. Now I can schedule an order for followup and I can run a daily report that lists todays followups or all followups (with links to the orders and also the last comment in the order, so I can see what the followup was about).

I have considered adding the entire kluge here as a contribution.
(I added a link to the other discussion here http://www.oscmax.com/forums/oscmax-...-customer.html)

What concerns me is that, as a contributor, I'll be making myself "too thin" if I add yet another place to check for new posts. I miss so many great ideas already... The whole followup idea is an example of the stuff that gets generated when you have people participating in a single place. By splitting some of that out to here it is diluted a small amount. By splitting it out some more it will get diluted even more. That is the core of my concern.

[Nimitz_1061]

Sorry for the delayed response. I have a bit of a property line dispute in progress and had to spend yesterday in government offices and today putting up fence (104 degrees out - whew!!).

I gotta tell you, I LOVED that thread. Very pertinent question, and I like your approach to code. Clean, tidy, and quite right - its not rocket science. Though, that said, I've worked in Huntville, AL and it may be more to the point to say that most elements of rocket science don't require quite the brilliance most people would think.

Heres the deal with time. Its like an elephant. Finding enough can time can seem to be as daunting as eating an elephant. But, it can be done - one bite at a time. The more people who grab forks, the quicker the job is done - and the less strain on any one person.

Another time saver is the process of getting things like this into a book. While cook books are not my favorite, this thread would make a fantastic entry in one. And the presence of such books with answers to frequently occuring issues not yet addressed in distributions can probably save quite a bit of time as well. (Not to mention their presence in free courses, FAQ's, etc. - which I will be building.)

That sort of activity ought to help free up time for you and others.

David

[met00]

Ah,

But my other point was...

While I tend to live on here, the problem brought up in the standard OSC forums was unique (not present here, no one had thought to ask).

By my reading the other forum I was able to see the question, think it through, generate the solution and then share it.

Another forum means another place to read, to get ideas and to... you get the point now? I love open source. I love to contribute back to the community. I love to see original "problems" and create original solutions.

Hmmm, maybe the solution is an "is this feature available" topic. That would reduce my reading to one thread in the new forums...

And thank you for the compliment. I have a background that goes back over 20+ years of writing KISS. You don't have much choice when you started your career writing assembly code that had to be toggled into the front panel of a PDP-11 and then uploaded to a NavStar Block II satellite in order to test it. You kids today have it so damn easy.

[michael_s]

More resources are always better. Stick with the one or two forums you like the most. There will be crossover from new forums into and out of the ones you make your regular stop.

New forums usually take a while to get going, and many never do. So, as with all new sites, if it is worth visiting, it will get a large following. If not, it will not, in which case, the entire question is moot.

From an individual's perspective, yes there can be too many forums, but in the wider scope, not really. Each community will bring its own value to the discussion. You may never visit the new forum, but maybe a member from the new forums one day decides to visit this site for the first time, and adds great insight to a discussion, or helps solve a problem, or refers you to a solution on their forum that was not even being discussed on this forum...

The internet is huge. There is always room for one more

[Nimitz_1061]

I added that proposed topic as a sticky in the osC Max forum there.

I do intend to spend time here, especially once I get my current book project done and start looking at documenting osCMax functions in my Doxygen project. Definitely have a book on osC Max in mind..

David