Bug and Progress Reports

Another worthwhile exercise is to look at the bug reports at http://www.oscommerce.com/ community/bugs/, which are nicely categorized, and are assigned to various experienced members of the community to either verify and act upon or dismiss as bogus. At the very least, browsing the bug lists provides a good method of seeing whether any problems you may have been experiencing could be the result of a bug. If you do suspect a bug in your installation of osCommerce, you should report it, but only after you have made certain it is not simply inexplicable behavior. Obviously, every bug report needs to be looked at, so it consumes someone’s time and effort to investigate a report—make reports only after some deliberation.

Progress reports can be found ahttp://www.oscommerce.com/community/reports and are very useful in terms of keeping abreast of the latest news within the osCommerce community. For example, the latest update at the time of writing (http://www.oscommerce.com/community/reports,115) contained information on the following and more:

• Team Reorganization: The osCommerce team has been reorganized to optimize the amount of resources available, and to spread responsibilities throughout the team.
• New Support Site Navigation Menu: A new navigation menu has been added to the support site, which now offers drop-down menu entries to the pages in each section of the support site.
• Forum Structure Updates: The forum structure has been updated to improve the usability of which postings should be made in which forum channels.
• Daylight Saving Time On The Forum: To correctly set the time on the forums to reflect daylight saving time, please go to your Control Panel | Options | Board Settings and select the "Is daylight saving time in effect?" option.
• Knowledge Base Update: A Table of Contents has been added to the knowledge base site to provide an overview of all knowledge base articles currently available.
• Most Downloaded Contributions: The Contributions section has been updated to allow browsing the contribution packages ordered by the most downloaded.

Obviously, this is all pretty pertinent information for the active osCommerce community member. Talking of being an active community member, a pretty fair statement about the community, of which you are now a member, is that you get out what you put in. The online community is a great resource, and with your help it will only improve.