With enough eyes all bugs...

Apparently succumb to that obscure phenomenon "diffusion of responsibility". At least, that seems to be the case with OSCommerce, a very useful and functional open-source shopping cart solution. Unfortunately, it's also clunky, messy, and somewhat out-dated from a code and usability point of view.

In the era of "Web 2.0" the constant reloading for every tiny change in the admin area is unconscionable and the table-based layout of the entire thing is astounding. Where's my AJAX-based admin tools that never reload a page? Where's the elegant, 100% CSS-based page layouts that I can change with the flick of a JavaScript-wired drop-down list? Why, o-why, are there single lines in the source code that are 500 characters long???

According to the OSCommerce website, there are also nearly 4,000 "contributions" (read: plugins that don't plug in very easily)... but they don't seem to be finding their way into the trunk of the OSCommerce build any time soon. Really, would anybody mind if tracking quantity by product attribute was a default option? Or customizing meta-tags?

The whole situation isn't helped by the fact that there isn't a plugin architecture of any kind. Installing a "contribution" amounts to following a long list of steps like

around line 220 of the products_info.php file find the following code: ... and replace it with ...

That's a real hoot when there are 20 steps and a dozen files to modify for a relatively small update.

And I know the whole thing is open source, so I could shut-up and do something about it; the problem is the whole thing needs a total re-write, and that's just not a one-person job.