Forums

The idea behind the osCommerce Forums is to provide a kind of huge noticeboard for everyone involved in osCommerce to ask questions and search for answers. It also provides a convenient way to meet other people in the same boat, which can be a useful means of sharing ideas and discussing technical issues with people at the same level of experience. Specifically, the following interesting and useful topics, among others, can be found at the osCommerce forums:

• News and announcements
• General support
• Installation and configuration
• Tips and tricks
• Contribution announcements
• Contribution support
• General chitchat
• Next steps
• E-commerce laws

With approximately 70,000 registered users and hundreds of people online at any given time, it is certain that you will find at least a part of the answer you need from the forums. However, bear in mind that like any public service, there are rules and guidelines to abide by when using these facilities. A quick read over the rules at http://forums.oscommerce.com/index.php?act= boardrules should avoid any infringements of netiquette.

One of the main points to remember is that you should make an honest effort to search for similar posts before adding your own post to any of the lists—obviously it is nice to keep redundancy in the lists to a minimum. This is quite a big point because it is notoriously hard to find the exact postings you are looking for. The forum gives you the option of ordering the posts based on a few criteria, searching for only those posts posted recently, and so on.

Of course, you are encouraged to register as a forum user in order to make use of the forums properly—you will find that you are able to use the search features without any problems.