I downloaded oscMax 2.5beta3 today as I am experimenting with osCommerce & CRELoaded without the success I wanted. oscMax retains the appropriate open source policy that CRELoaded seems to lose within its own conflicting interest of selling the ‘fully featured’ version. While the original osCommerce still languishes behind Harald’s dominance of the code and lengthy periods of apparent inactivity.

Why am I looking? Because I recently discovered that my old version of oscommerce had succumbed to hacking. I dont need to publish the details but suffice to say that while I have cleaned up the mess, I am skittish about it happening again and I want to bolt it down as much as possible. To do so I want a current stable platform without needing to manually edit / install a small mountain of add-ons.

CRELoaded has been a great alternative over the years but the above mentioned conflict as they try to make a sale-able product along-side a cut-down version as a loss-leader just does not work for me.

Enter oscMax. Yes, it has been around in various forms for a number of years, but I have only just tried it in it’s latest version.

Verdict? The case has only just started, but it’s osCommerce, pre-loaded with most of what I need, and fully open source. So at this stage I am working on a trial system and tweaking what I need to make it work.