5 Reasons Why osCommerce Sucks

Unlike most other blogging, CMS, and ecommerce scripts, osCommerce has absolutely no involvement with theme integration. If a developer wants to customize the look of osCommerce, he would need to hack every piece of code in the files. This includes reading scripts and understanding exactly how the whole system works. All HTML tags are inserted right into classes and functions. Editting one piece of code means editting everything else.

Since reading through every script is required to modify anything, having a clear OOP structure would help. Indeed osCommerce does use classes, but the benefits are completely retarded by the structure. Many classes are duplicates (but different) of each other, and different scripts use all these classes for the same purposes. Most products/category selections are done through handcoded SQL queries that use global SQL functions. The internal structure of osCommerce is an utter mess.

Modules are good for extending its capabilities, but installing a module means opening up an osCommerce file, go to the n’th line, copy and paste from the downloaded script. Most of the times this won’t work because to have a customized site, the scripts are completely hacked up already — all the line numbers and used functions are mismatched. Then comes the process of using a file comparison tool. Isn’t that a fun way of installing modules.

While I’m not criticizing osCommerce for its lack of frequent updates (by frequent, I mean at least one minor update per year) since it is dependent on contributors, it is definitely unsuitable for any active ecommerce site. The lack of updates means a very outdated system of everything, including inefficient coding and of course vulnerabilities.

Zen Cart is exactly the opposite of everything listed above. I looked through some of the code in Zen Cart, and I just wished I had found out about it much earlier. So there you go, don’t every take osCommerce into consideration for an ecommerce site.