osCommerce Tips

A quick way to change the default look of your osCommerce store is to change the width of the navigation columns that sit to the left and right of your main content. Here’s how to do it.

Continue reading ‘How to Change the Width of the Navigation Columns’

In part one of this three part series, I explained what Subversion is, and why it is useful.

In this part we will setup a small project and then use TortoiseSVN to manage it for us. This will involve making minor changes to a vanilla version of osCommerce 2.2 MS2. We will not be installing or running the store, so there is no need to have a web server or mySQL installed to complete this tutorial.

The examples used have been geared towards osCommerce developers, but will still be useful to others.

Continue reading ‘How Subversion Can Solve Your Development Nightmares – Part 2 of 3′

Imagine this…

You’ve just spent several hours upgrading your client’s store. Everything looks great on your test server, so you push the changes live.

Firing up a browser, you visit the client’s live store to marvel at your work, only to be presented with a series of error messages.

Uh oh.

The store is broken, your client is losing sales, and you’ve got no idea how long it’s going to take to fix. What do you do?

Continue reading ‘How Subversion Can Solve Your Development Nightmares – Part 1 of 3′

This three part series is for osCommerce developers who want to manage and organise the way they work. Using revision control software you can make your life easier and save yourself from potential problems.

• Part 1 - An introduction to Subversion and TortoiseSVN.
• Part 2 - Manage a small project with TortoiseSVN in this walkthrough. Covers creating a repository, importing a project, checking out code, commiting changes and reverting to a previous verison.
• Part 3 - Expand your knowledge by getting to grips with branching, merging and tags.

A new version of Leapfrog has been released.

Please visit the Leapfrog overview post to download it.

Leapfrog is a dynamic visitor tracking contribution for osCommerce. You can read more about it here or watch the online demo.

Continue reading ‘Leapfrog Version 1.2 Released’

If you are having trouble installing Leapfrog then head over to the official support thread on the osCommerce forums.

Forum members are actively posting solutions to issues they have found. The one you need might be there already.

Whilst working on my Power Pack, I discovered two limitations of the osCommerce install process.

The default osCommerce package comes complete with a SQL file containing all the tables and sample data needed to populate a database. This file can be found at catalog/includes/install/oscommerce.sql.

I wanted to add extra SQL commands that were needed by my contributions into this file, so the installation process would do everthing.

This way anyone installing my osCommerce Power Pack would not need to perform additional tasks having been through the default install process (great for new users who aren’t all that technically savvy).

Having added my commands to the end of oscommerce.sql, I proceeded through the default install process only to find some of my commands were not being executed.

Hmm…

Continue reading ‘2 Caveats To Be Aware of When Creating Your Own osCommerce Package’

A new version of Leapfrog has been released to solve an issue which results in a blank HTML page appearing when Leapfrog is launched.

You can download the latest version here.

This issue affects Leapfrog V1.0 and has been resolved in Leapfrog V1.1 and higher.

Continue reading ‘Leapfrog Bug Fix - Blank HTML Page’

The ability to watch what your store visitors are doing is very important.

So much so that I included a user tracking contribution in a recent article. But understanding the ebb and flow of visitors is difficult because the data is always presented in a very dry format. Plus you have to keep refreshing the page to see if anything has happened recently.

I decided that what osCommerce really needed was a dynamic, realtime, funky visitor tracking contribution.

So I built one. Its called Leapfrog and it’s quite addictive to watch!

Download it for your site, have a play and let me know what you think.

Continue reading ‘Leapfrog - A Realtime Visitor Tracking Contribution’

You know you’ve been using osCommerce too long when:

1. You have the osCommerce support forum as your home page
2. You’re thinking chmod 777 when trying to unlock your front door
3. You know how to say ‘Welcome Guest! Would you like to log yourself in?’ in English, German and Spanish
4. Any mention of SSL sends shivers down your spine
5. You have nightmares about padlock symbols
6. You never want to see ‘There’s Something About Mary’ or ‘A Bug’s Life’ every again
7. You can relate to all of the above!

And seven of my favourites from the osCommerce forums:

1. You begin signing your name prefixed with tep_ (by custodian)
2. You feel a sense of urgency when you have difficulty accessing forums.oscommerce.com (by custodian)
3. Your osCommerce store can do more things than eBay, even though you only have 10 things in your entire product listings (by custodian)
4. You download every contribution just in case you might need it one day (by Java Roasters)
5. You refer to your day planner as configure.php and your spouse as application_top (on a good day) (by GraphicsGuy)
6. Your children are “includes” (by GraphicsGuy)
7. You have a dog named footer.php (by GraphicsGuy)

Got some more? Submit your own in the comments section.