Got Fork? Make sure you know enough…

By | June 2, 2011

The other day I was contacted via email by a member of the osCommerce forum asking a very basic question about how osCommerce displays categories.

This person offers a fork of osCommerce…in my opinion anyone who forks needs to have enough knowledge to not ask ANY questions in the osCommerce forum, or make sure that they have a team around them who can deal with these situations.

Am I being unreasonable?

5 thoughts on “Got Fork? Make sure you know enough…

  1. Sara

    Hi Burt, yes I think you are to harsh 🙂
    The requested display of cat’s name in product listing is missing in all versions,
    and I do beleive it would be very nice to have.
    I am not a coder, I just have visions of a better OSC-world… 🙂

  2. multimixer

    I think you are absolutely right !

    If somebody “fork” osCommerce, or any other software, then why is he/she doing this? I guess because he/she want’s to use this software as a base to develop something else, following a vision that is different that the “official” route this software takes

    That’s all right, but it means of course that the one who is forking knows the software well enough, out of question. And there is no need to run around in the original software’s forum asking basic questions

    @Sara, in your case, all you do is to “offer” a basic osCommerce store with a couple of addons added and some kind of a template. So, why don’t you do this within osCommerce?

    You say you are not a coder, and at the same time you promise on your website that “We offer professional e-stores with guarantees” and “We can help you with everything” and ” we have fixed a lot of bugs in the core code” etc

    What to say ….

  3. Isa

    **Am I being unreasonable?**

    No, you’re not being unreasonable, if I can’t trust the person I’m hiring to have the knowledge to do what I’m paying them to do, then I might as well hire my dentist to work on my shop.

    These days people want to set up a “business” quickly, at little or no cost, run it from the comfort of their own homes and possibly make money from it, so here come the self appointed experts offering so called “professional help”.

    The very first “developer” I hired was in fact posting at the forums because he didn’t know how to do the work I was paying him to do, too bad I found out too late.

    In the case of e-commerce, the truth is that out there it’s full of people branding themselves coders (or experts or the equivalent) when in reality they wouldn’t know a variable even if it bit them in the @$$.

  4. J Green

    What fork was it they develop and do they tout themselves as a guru on the forum?

    If it something they sell as a product, it is unreasonable. If it is a personal project, then fair enough to get anothers help if it is offered.

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