Marco Steinhäuser

In the recent months, I attended all of the main trade fairs of the e-commerce industry in Germany and France:

• dmexco (Digital Marketing Exposition & Conference) in Cologne
• Salon E-Commerce in Paris
• MOW (Mail Order World) in Wiesbaden

I joined the OXID eSales crew at our booths and I would like to share my very personal take aways of the events with you.

Don’t just ask me what the software can do for you – also ask what you can do for the software

A main part of my job as the Community Guide at OXID eSales is to help spreading the word about OXID eShop and to ultimately help grow the open-source community. Thus, I am very happy to talk to booth visitors and agencies interested in our product range and the community. In particular, I enjoyed a lot of very interesting conversations to folks who knew what open source software is about; people who came up with really good ideas, being excited about new challenges to enhance OXID eShop and committed to sharing some very interesting extensions.

Yet, there have been visitors at the booth who made me feel cheap because they were just interested in free as in free beer. I could smell their greed and selfishness. In such cases, I will kindly ask you to download, install and check for yourself. Also, I will not walk you through all the implemented features and I will not help you find modules available for no or very low cost.

If you want e-commerce software at no cost and don’t want to get involved in an open-source community at all, that’s perfectly legit, but don’t waste my time. If, on the other hand, you ask questions on our forums, I and other community members would be happy to help, because the answer to your question will help others.

To make a long story short: Free riders are welcome as long as they don’t waste the time of those in our community who want to build something together.

There are many ways how to contribute: Your translation to another language is as welcome as bug reports, module and core contributions. Even with the purchase of a commercial license you foster the development of our open-source edition.

What does open source development mean for a product also sold under a commercial license?

At the booths, I often got asked about how the OXID eShop open-source community influences development of the Professional and Enterprise Edition.

The short answer is: The community would kick our ass if we developed and communicated badly – and it did so in the past.

By going open source in 2008, we deliberately self-imposed community pressure upon OXID eSales. Since then, the community influences our product development.

For example: Instead of hiding security issues, we are forced to fix those issues in a short time, in fact until another developer will come up with the problem. On the communications side, we inform solution partners and support contract owners beforehand by distributing a private security bulletin to them, given that they still need some time to implement the fix we provide, before we make the bulletin publicly available.

Dear potential partners, get to grips with your channel concept

I have also been approached by potential partner companies at the three events. Most of them would like to join for just one reason: to have us forward leads to them. Of course, this is totally fine from a business perspective and OXID eSales is happy to negotiate such agreements. Yet, such a one-sided approach neglects the benefits of the open-source community for our partners.

So, at the booths, I always advised potential partners to consider how they can tap into the OXID eShop community or related open-source communities to promote their products or services. For example, the payment providers we partner with have developed interfaces or modules for connecting OXID eShop with their infrastructure. That way, they provide something useful to the OXID eShop or related communities and get word-of-mouth marketing going.

As earlier announced in my blog post on oxid-esales.com, Friday, March 11th, was our first local developer meet-up in Leipzig, Germany.

I personally was really surprised to see 16 people attending, including developers from our partners D³ Data Development (Thalheim, Saxony), GN2 netwerk (Coburg, Bavaria), marmalade.de (Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt), dotSource GmbH (Jena, Thuringia) and Ontraq Europe (Augsburg, Bavaria). Dirk Senebald (Gera, Thuringia), Gregor Berg (Dortmund, North Rhine-Westphalia) and Alexander Thomas (Berlin) also took part, together with my personal friends and (former) co-workers Mathias Fiedler (Leipzig/Berlin) and Erik Kort.

Christian Zacharias explains

Joscha Krug proudly shows off his OXID Commons shirt

These guys found something really interesting

Our host, Hannes from Geyserhaus, worked really professionally to ensure that everything was set up for us. The projector and the screen were already installed, together with the tables and power cords. Fortunately, there was no Internet connection; this allowed us all to concentrate on  Christan Zacharias‘ talk about the OXID eShop framework, the OXID eFire platform, how to write extensions, and news for developers in OXID eShop 4.5.0.

The entire talk took about six hours including interposed questions, laid-back discussions and straight comments to OXID’s (Erik’s and mine) point of view. We also had an interesting four-person discussion about the pros and cons of Open Source Software. Through the process, I picked up at least 25 points to be “injected” into OXID’s product management cycle. Thanks for all the comments, mates!

At the end of the day, I think the aims of a meeting like this – namely, getting to know the faces behind forum or mailing list posts, learning about the experiences of others and bringing coders together for collaboration chances – were absolutely fulfilled, and that it was an enjoyable and learning experience for all.

I’m curious now about upcoming meetings in other cities like Berlin, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Munich (in progress), Cologne and Frankfurt. Are any of you keen to take over the organization of such meetings? Drop me a line or post a comment if so!

The past few days, dev.oxidforge.org thingy was launched. We are still looking for a proper name for it (vote at http://www.oxid-esales.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3401, need to be logged in as a community member!).

Now “OXID developer network – ODN” is about to win that race and I personally like it very much. I already requested an additional subdomain like odn.oxidforge.org for it.

Like Ralf posted today to our corporate blog, a separate user was introduced for that kind of stuff called OXIDlab “… where we publish prototypes or test implementations, which are prepared by our teams. These results of our daily work are very often the first steps to new features for our products … ” like he says. He already uploaded the first finished extension, “SuperClix Export“, to OXID eXchange – the module market place.

Well, and I am still hassling around with that bl**dy SVN+SSH write access to the projects SCM sites on http://dev.oxidforge.org. Reading SVN works properly as committing is followed by an error message like “Authorization refused”. Will get it fixed by the next week, promised!

Tomorrow morning I will officially and proudly announce our collaboration and development platform available at http://dev.oxidforge.org. The software basis is FusionForge, a GForge fork. This platform seems to be ideal for team-work on committing code, language extensions, localizations, themes and much more.

There is just one thing we are still suffering from: How the heck shall we call that baby?
Of course, “collaboration and development platform” or even the URL name is much too long while “dev” is too short and not very meaningful. How about something like “developer zone” or “com-zone”? The word “forge” is already occupied by the whole OXIDforge thing including download pages and so on.

Let me know about your ideas.