How the Osclass project started and evolved
Osclass began in 2011 as a dedicated classifieds application: a lightweight PHP and MySQL stack operators could install on ordinary hosting and own end to end. Early years built the core model still used today: listings and categories, an oc-admin backoffice, theme and plugin hooks, multilingual .po/.mo packs, and optional country geolocation data. A global community of site owners and developers grew around forums, themes, and extensions.
Toward the end of that first decade, the original product company slowed and then stopped shipping core releases. Community builds reached the 3.9 line with only small steps forward, while other unofficial branches appeared. The original company behind Osclass shut down in 2019. That left a clear gap: sites still ran Osclass in production, but the mainline had no active maintainer.
In
2020,
OsclassPoint took over active development and maintenance. The first OsclassPoint-led core was
Osclass 4.0.0 (16 September 2020), documented as a new era after years of stagnation: the Sigma front-office theme, the Omega admin theme, installer UI updates, and PHP 7.4 compatibility. See the
4.0 release notes and the full
changelog.
Later version numbering jumped from the 4.x line to 8.0.0 (November 2021). That bump was deliberate: the build that would have been 4.5 shipped as 8.0.0 to avoid confusion with unrelated forks. Releases have continued since, including full PHP 8.5 compatibility and ongoing work on the current 8.4.x line. Hook-based plugins and themes from earlier years commonly keep working when they avoid removed APIs.
OsclassPoint also runs the official Osclass marketplace for themes and plugins (operated by AB profitrade), community forums, and product docs. Core stays free under the Apache License 2.0. OsclassPoint cites more than 120,000 people who have chosen Osclass over the project's life (cumulative adoption, not a live census). WebTechSurvey detects about 1,700 live sites, the right order of magnitude for a niche classifieds script. CVE history and how to report a vulnerability are on the
security page. For product comparisons, start from the
features page or the
how to choose a classifieds stack.
