Issue #11: September 10, 2002

By Harald Ponce de Leon

September 10, 2002

New Team Member
New Forums Online
Checkout Procedure Rewrite
FedEx Shipping Module

New Team Member

Ian C Wilson has joined the osCommerce team for his dedicated support in the forums and the dedicated work on his Credit Class feature.

We all welcome Ian and look forward to the time he spends on the project.

The Credit Class feature should be commited in the CVS repository as soon as the new checkout procedure has been commited.

New Forums Online

New forums are now available for the community to participate in, which offer a wide variety of new features for communicating publicly and privately.

The response from the community has been overall positive so far, and look forward to improving other services which are in need of maintenance work.

The new forums can be reached at the following address:

https://www.oscommerce.com/forums

If you cannot reach that address, please try again at a later time when the DNS servers have been updated with the new domain information.

Due to the change in the forum structure, the following mailing lists have been deactivated:

[email protected]
[email protected]

In place for offline access, news servers are in operation which will be in synchronization with the forums. Currently the news servers are available in read-only mode – writing mode will be enabled at a later date.

For information about the new forums and news servers, please visit the following page:

 https://www.oscommerce.com/community.php

Checkout Procedure Rewrite

The checkout procedure is currently being rewritten to the proposal reached on the previous developers forum.

The thread containing the proposal can be read here:

https://www.oscommerce.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=22632

The new checkout procedure has optimized the shipping and payment modules which introduces changes in the module structure. All modules in CVS will be updated with the new structure, but modules in the Contributions will need to be updated and contributed again.

To ease this, API documentation for the checkout procedure, the payment modules, and the shipping modules will be made available.

The new checkout procedure should be commited in the CVS repository some time this week.

FedEx Shipping Module

At the end of last month FedEx have terminated one of their shipping services which the FedEx shipping module was using. This service was not officially available for use so FedEx cannot be held responsible for this sudden cause of action.

A representative from FedEx contacted me after complaints were sent, and provided me with information to build a new module to use their official RateFinder shipping service. This module was commited in the CVS repository 13 hours later.

The new module now allows for international shipping from America (something the previous module did not support) and world-wide shipping will be available soon.

Another bonus is the possibility to retrieve all possible rates for an order – not just the current one – which will be available once the new checkout procedure has been commited.