4 osCommerce Contributions you should know about (if you use osCommerce - otherwise you shouldn't care a bit - that is unless you are thinking of creating an online store with osCommerce)

osCommerce contributions are designed to be slotted into an existing osCommerce installation and provide specific enhancements or capabilities.

There are various kinds of contributions. From language packs to new payment modules to new ways of presenting products or administering the store.

Contributions are provided by the community of osCommerce users and are available in the contributions section of the osCommerce website. There are only limited restrictions on adding a contribution, so the quality does vary.

The best contributions:

• are well documented,
• adhere to the osCommerce coding conventions
• take into account security and efficiency, and
• have been thoroughly tested.

If the contribution is useful and popular, any problems tend to be sorted out quickly by the community and the fixes made available as a new version.

Wondering what this is all about? Start here:
What is osCommerce?

For free assistance people often look to the osCommerce community. Posting a question in the relevant forum will often answer your question. Of course if there are problems with the contribution you may just find a bunch of other people with the same problem.

Paid assistance from an osCommerce specialist will often save time and frustration.

These 4 contributions have been selected for their popularity and usefulness.

It's important for merchants to stay up to date with the overall performance of their business. The Sales Report contribution helps by calculating and displaying sales data for your store. Key information is displayed graphically.

Read more: Tracking Your Store's Performance: Sales Report contribution

Google's Sitemap service lets you submit the relevant pages from your site to Google. As well as being able to push information on the content in your site to Google, you also have access to important search statistics related to your store.

Read more: Improve search engine results for your osCommerce store: Google Sitemaps

Easy Populate is a popular contribution that allows you to download your product database, make changes to product information in a spreadsheet, and upload to replace the existing information.

Read more: Review: Easy Populate - the fast way to add or edit your products

The default osCommerce system does not generate thumbnails automatically. Yeah - this is a weakness of osCommerce. Pretty much every osCommerce store needs a thumbnailer of some sort to reduce image sizes and improve quality of image presentation.

Read more: Essential osCommerce Modification - Generate Thumbnail Images

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