Support Site Updates

The support site has been updated in preparation for the upcoming project release and to meet the needs of the growing community through the feedback they have provided.

Additional sites to the osCommerce support site have been made available in the past few months, and are now easily reachable through a common header they all share. All official osCommerce support sites are now available under a Network section and include the following sites:

* osCommerce Support Site
* Community Support Forums
* Knowledge Base
* Community Blogs
* Planet osCommerce
* osCommerce Worldwide
* German Support Site
* Dutch Support Site

The osCommerce support site, knowledge base, and osCommerce Worldwide sites have been updated to be XHTML and CSS compliant, and will offer alternative CSS layouts in the future.

The structure of the support site has been updated with the documentation now being available under the Solutions section, and a new Partners section has been added to list the partnerships the project has secured with other businesses, and describes the Community and Corporate Sponsorship programs.

A login form has been implemented into the Contributions section and now requires a community profile to be created when providing contributions to the community. This allows the awareness of contribution authors to be increased in the community with a link to their contributions being available in their profile. This also allows statistics to be generated on the contributions made and on contribution authors, and will be presented to the community in the near future.

The layout of the Contributions section has also been updated and now contains one download link which is served randomly through our download mirror sites at Pair Networks (America), SunSite.dk (Denmark), and the German Support Site (Germany).

The Live Shops section now provides a direct link to the store and a new Sponsored Shops page has been added that lists the shops of community sponsors.

The navigation on the Knowledge Base site has been updated to provide a javascript based category tree to help with the presentation of the category structure. An alternative CSS layout is also available for printers, to avoid having the category tree being printed along with the article.

The newest additions to the network of support sites are the Planet osCommerce and osCommerce Worldwide sites.

The Planet osCommerce site aggregates team member blogging entries on one page, and provides a means to stay up to date on how the project is progressing.

The Planet osCommerce site can be reached at:

https://planet.oscommerce.com

The osCommerce Worldwide site displays a map showing the locations of team members and community members around the world. Showing your location on the map is free and participation is encouraged!

The osCommerce Worldwide site can be reached at:

https://worldwide.oscommerce.com

The osCommerce team is also growing with the introduction of the Live Shops team, who are now responsible for the Live Shops section on the support site and the My Store channel on the community support forums.

The Live Shops section now contains over 3,000 activated and confirmed entries, with each being assigned into categories that will be available as a new navigation means in the near future.

There are still over 6,000 entries to confirm, categorize, and activate, and are proud to announce that the first live shop entry made in 2000 is still active today, 5 years later!

Congratulations to the Kites.de team! Their live shop entry can be viewed here:

https://www.oscommerce.com/shops/live,1

We’d like to thank the community for their feedback on how the project is being managed, and look forward to announcing the next set of updates in the near future!

This announcement can be discussed at the community support forum at:

https://www.oscommerce.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=158960