Introduction

In the beginning there was osCommerce. And it carried the hopes and dreams many an online retailer with its seemingly complete feature set and eager community. Whilst community contributions provided a hit-and-miss source of solutions to requirements raised by the evolving e-commerce landscape around it and with rival carts becoming available, the core osCommerce code underwent just two upgrades and one patch in about 5 years.

Around September 2010, the latest significant upgrade, v2.3 was launched. It added some image handling features and a template system but it remains to be seen whether or not these improvements are enough to bring it up to speed with its contemporary rivals like Zen Cart, CRELoaded and oscMax which already had template systems, not to mention the new generation of Magento, Prestashop and OpenCart which are threatening to consign dear old osCommerce to the history books once and for all.

I will focus below on the image handling capabilities of osCommerce v2.2. The latest v2.3 release will be examined in another article. The 'Next Generation' v3.0 release has been in beta for years and still seems some way off, so that remains outside the scope of this repository for now.

We were all young once

It would be easy to knock the product image handling facilities of osCommerce v2.2, but it should be remembered that when first released, the way it presented product pictures was sufficient for many people's needs. One single product image could be uploaded in Admin via the 'Create Product' page. Its display size would be set in the general Admin configuration settings (watch out for stretching!) which applied to product images in every product info page. In the product info page, a default Javascript triggered native browser window could popup to display an enlarged version at the click of the text link beneath it. Images were not resized before being sent to the browser so some bandwidth was always wasted with every page load. And that was it as far as 'out-of-the-box' functionality went. For six years or so.

Community to the rescue

Before flash galleries, carousels, jQuery and CoverFlow had been dreamt of however, contributions began appearing as far back as 2003 that improved on the vanilla product image handling functionality. From the earliest of these:

'Accessible Image Popup' - "This will make all links to enlarged images 100% accessible for browsers and search engines.",

contributions aimed at osCommerce image handling initially focused on tweaking the original limited functionality, but before long whole new add-ons - with their own database tables, file structure and image folders came on the scene offering a broader range of display options and behaviours.

The early pace setter was 'Dynamic Mopics'. This contribution allowed users to upload unlimited numbers of thumbnails and their corresponding enlarged versions and display the thumbnails with 'click to enlarge' links beneath them in the product info page. Although a welcome addition - which became part of the default cart functionality in osCommerce forks such as oscMax and CREloaded - the contribution was still relatively fiddly to install and couldn't resize images prior to downloading to the browser which meant that needless bandwidth was being used in many page loads.

Hot on the heals of 'Dynamic Mopics' came 'More Pics'. In it's more recent versions, this contribution allows an unlimited number of thumbnails to appear below an enlarged image anywhere in the product info page. The enlarged image changes dynamically as the mouse is hovered over each thumbnail. Despite being difficult to install, with almost 30 native files having to be edited, this contribution proved popular and finally provided a tried and tested way of creating product image presentations that could at least compete with those of rival carts.

The 'Ultra Pics - MS2 Image Addon Pack' also rivaled 'Dynamic Mopics' and 'More Pics', with easier installation and although it too had improvements made to it which added one or two Javascript popup options like Lightbox or FancyBox, it also suffered from limited layout configurations and a long list of changes and new versions which made it highly likely that some manual adjustments to the code would be needed to make it work perfectly for any given site.

Apart from these heavyweights, the largest group of image handling contributions are concerned with adding one or other of the myriad Javascript popup engines to pictures in the product page. One other noteworthy contribution is the 'On the fly Auto Thumbnailer Using GD2 Library'. Although more of a development tool than a complete image presentation solution, this one was significant because it was the grandaddy of several subsequent contributions all doing the same thing - saving bandwidth by resizing images to their thumbnail sizes before downloading to the browser. Code from this contribution has been used in several of the 'complete' image display solutions that are available, including the ones we've looked at above.

What about the attributes?

When it came to handling images that depicted product attributes, one contribution proved particularly popular. 'Options As Images' was started back in 2003, highlighting the fundamental need for a package that allowed separate images to showcase each product attribute value. The idea was to show thumbnails for each attribute value and beneath each one have a radio button which the user could click to select that attribute value for inclusion in the shopping cart when the 'Add To Cart' button was clicked.

Further improvements to the mod made it work with multiple attributes per product and integrated it with other popular mods such as 'Option Types' and 'QTPro' but apart from that, most updates were small bugfixes and tweaks.

How PAPs Compares

As we've seen, the default osCommerce image handling functionality is way behind what is required in today's e-commerce space. So any comparison between Product Attribute Pictures (PAPs) and osCommerce functionality is actually a comparison between osCommerce add-ons.

So first of all it is worth mentioning that PAPs is easier to install (less installation steps, less files to edit) than any of the free solutions mentioned above, and guaranteed support (within 24 hours) is provided by people who actually wrote and are familiar with the entire code base, not just certain small aspects of it.

Moving on to functionality, it is probably reasonable to assume that somewhere in the huge osCommerce Contributions site exist mods which individually cover all the various functions that PAPs performs, but none come close to bringing them all together in one reliable application. The 'Options as Images' mod has similar functionality to PAPs v2.0, but it doesn't have the range of popup engines, layout choices and image effects that PAPs has. Popular mods for dynamically changing the product price when attribute selections are made also exist, yet this is also standard in PAPs. The same could be said of the ability to display selected attribute images in the shopping cart - mods exist for this, but PAPs has it built-in.

Similarly, the copying of attributes from one product to others in one go has always been a sought after feature and the 'Easy Populate with Attributes' mod has tried to address this, but again with PAPs, it's available with all the other features in one installation.

But don't take my word for it, why not try out the full-featured PAPs for free today! Create an account and visit the 'Download PAPs!' page now!

Links

Accessible Image Popup

Dynamic Mopics

More Pics

Ultra Pics - MS2 Image Addon Pack

On the fly Auto Thumbnailer Using GD2 Library

Options As Images

Option Types

QTPro

Easy Populate with Attributes