Monday, June 06, 2005

Search No More

While in search of the perfect program I wish you luck. It probably doesn't exist, even if you wrote it yourself. OpenSourceCommerce (OSC) is no exception, though it is one of the nicest eCommerce programs I've ever seen. One of the great things about Open Source programs is the resource of a planet that has truly brilliant people scattered about. One such person is Joey Garcia from Ohio, USA. In OSC there is a feature called product attributes where one would assign selections such as colors or sizes for items. Nice as it is, you must go through the series of steps for every variation of a product. This makes for an incredibly long, hard to manage list of things that ... well... you could give up. Enter the OSC community and "contributions", where users with programming skills develop add-on products to enhance the already great program. Joey wrote a contribution last year that enabled the administrator to create a set of attributes that could be assigned at once. The user could make as many sets for OSC as needed. The program was probably pretty good, but he didn't stop with a great job. Over the past year he has enhanced the program and documented the implementation (no easy task) to make it what it is today: a great time saving contribution to the OSC community. Not only is his program fantastic, but the documentation is so great that I completed the changes and installs in less than 30-minutes. The resulting system took what would be 3 to 8 minutes per product down to less than 30 second per product. THAT's a time saver. With nearly 100 products, well, you can imagine how thankful I am for Joey Garcia's contribution. Great job, Joey.

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