This is not intended to be an exhaustive tech-head definitive list of all the different versions of osCommerce out there, instead it is hoped that it will help inform you about the "standard release" versions from the official osCommerce developers.

Again let me emphasize that I won't cover any of the many "forks" of osCommerce, that is versions where someone has developed a quite different core code base.

With that clear there are still some issues you have to beware of when selecting a version of osCommerce to use in your new store.

The very latest version of osCommerce can always be  downloaded from the official developer site at www.oscommerce.com

Currently there is a version 2 series that almost everyone is working with and a version 3 that is being developed but in my opinion, at least, is not quite ready for real time use So I am just going to talk about the V2 releases here.

The major osCommerce versions that have been released and heavily used are as follows:

V2.2MS1 -OLD and not suitable for new developments.

V2.2MS2.2 - OLD still very usable but has problems with newer hosting services that use PHP5 and or MySQL V5. Probably the most compatible version of osCommerce to modify but probably needs to be modified to suit PHP and MySQL on servers. (there were a couple of official patched versions made to deal with this issue and fix some security issues and bugs. The last being 060817 patch.)

2.2 Release Candidates  These are a series of the very latest releases based on the V2.2MS2 code base but with some extra features beyond a purely maintenance release.

2.2rc2a is (currently)  the latest release and in my view this is the version you should base your store on unless you have a problem with a "contribution" that won't work with it. Most old contributions should be made to work OK with minor changes.

Things to beware.

If buying a stock osCommerce template - most of these are supplied as simple replacement scripts so you need to check that they were designed around the latest osCommerce version and not an older osCommerce code base!