History

How things began

OXID eShop is a popular ecommerce shopping system. Over the time there are quite a lot shop owners using it to present and sell their goods online, global players as well as small one-(wo)man-startups.
Thoug OXID eShop offers a lot of features out of the box, there is always to adjust a lot to your own needs and make it fit your individual preferences. Many service providers extend OXID eShop by developing modules to enhance functionality, which is a quite easy task with OXID. As OXID eSales offers a free Community Edition (CE) of their eShop, lots of them carry on the open source idea and contribute their code to the community. There is quite a bunch of useful modules available for free - and as well more for a reasonable price.

One thing the community feels not comfortable with is the backend administration interface. It is based on a frameset and does not satisfy the needs of a modern web application. As the main goal for OXID was to enhance the core, the backend got a kind of stuck.

A lot of moaning about this was rumbling through the community, but no concrete ideas came up.

That's why Joscha Krug introduced the idea of building a new backend interface at the OXID unconference 2011 - why not build a completely reworked admin based on the needs of the community working with it day by day? Soon a bunch of developers and graphic artists supported him, some basic ideas where discussed. Over the year some research and brainstorming was done, some scribbles where made.

In March 2012 it was time for the next step - the kick-off meeting in Halle in the office premises of OXID including a first hackathon. This was the moment where the project came to live.

The idea is to build the administration interface upon a REST interface. This way the business logic is strictly separated from the presentation layer. So it will be possible to develop independant clients on any OS and for any device.

The project is very young and so there isn't a working version yet. Nonetheless the team keeps on developing. You can follow this project on Github.