As often as I can I go out the osCommerce support forum. My intentions are to do my part to contribute to the community by lending a hand to those who might be experiencing some problems. As a general rule, I'll view the new posts since the last time I made a visit. I'll pay particular attention to the posts which up to that point have not received any replies. I do this for two reasons, first because I know how frustrating it can be to have a problem that is driving you crazy and not to receive any responses. And secondly those questions tend to be more challenging. I've found that by going for the challenging questions causes me to have to stretch a bit. It's not completely unusual for me to do a little bit of research before proceeding to post an answer.

Participating in the forums has given me some interesting observations. Its amazing how sometimes the same question will be asked over and over, the unprotected admin area likely being the all time classic. For those that don't know, the admin area of osCommerce out of the box has no security on it. The best and easiest to implement is to create a .htaccess file to protect the admin folder.

I just have to scratch my head sometimes thinking about someone sitting there totally frustrated waiting for an answer when the answer is right there if they would just take a few minutes to do a search. That being said, we all at one time or another for what ever reason, are likely looking for the quick fix with the least amount of effort. So that's ok, even those types of questions usually deserve an answer.

Another thing I've noticed is that a lot of people get their first taste of osCommerce because it comes as a package with their web hosting. That can be a good thing because it is a very powerful and robust system. But I have also seen it become the source of some frustrations when there are errors or things do go as expected. The cool thing is that it is open source software and therefore it's free. The challenging thing can be that its open source software and therefore to really get in a modify and or fix things you really do need to have an understanding of PHP/MySQL web development. Also throw in the basic skills of HTML and Javascript, not to mention FTP and some basic web site administration.

If you are someone new to osCommerce and one who intends to do the work yourself, probably the best advice is not to have the expectation of having a fully functional award winning site within a handful of days. Rather its more realistic to take the time and effort to gain an understanding of the architecture and function of the system. Study the layout of the various files and how they interact. If you are new to PHP get yourself a book to study. This was a few years before I became involved with osCommerce, but I actually read PHP and MySQL for Dummy's before I attempted any sort of PHP development.

My intentions are, from time to time, to add some blog entries with a few tips and pointers to help understand osCommerce and how things work. No matter who you are, we all started as novices at one point or another there is no shame in that. While I am still learning every day and hope to be for the rest of my life, I do enjoy sharing my knowledge with others.

The very best thing about participating in the osCommerce forums is being able to provide a little bit of help to someone who is struggling and who takes that help and runs with it. It's a very cool thing to see someone who you might have helped a few weeks ago now out there helping others to solve their problems.