Whats New in osCommerce Version 3?
To existing osCommerce store owners, Version 3 will look and act much like the old osCommerce that they know and love. A few graphical changes include top navigation drop-down menus instead of the screen-hogging left column navigation. Brightly colored icons adorn each menu item. The really new stuff is all on the inside, the guts of the program. The new framework is said to be object-oriented, focusing on the data. This is very different from the previous programming method that focused on the function of a module. That required building the program from scratch. It also requires a very different kind of programmer, as you will see below. Of the other popular open source ecommerce programs, only Magento is built with an object-oriented framework. The Magento team used a pre-existing framework called Zend to speed development of that program. To the delight of designers worldwide, the new program contains built-in templates. The templates are built to existing standards called XHTML/CS
