osCommerce Tips

Recently, I have been developing an application called oscWatcher.

Although it is not ready to be released just yet, I wanted to tell you a bit about what it does.

oscWatcher 2 has now been released.

Download it here.

oscWatcher runs in your Windows system tray (or mac dock) and alerts you whenever an order is received by your osCommerce store. Within the application you can see what has been ordered, who by and how much it is worth.

The neat thing about oscWatcher is that you don’t need to keep refreshing your browser to check for orders. In fact, your browser doesn’t even need to be open!

Continue reading ‘oscWatcher - Instant order notifications straight to your desktop’

In this post, I stated my intentions to make an automated phone assistant for osCommerce, promising to update you on any developments.

Well, I’ve been playing over the last week and managed to get all three services outlined in that post working.

Today, I’ll discuss how I implemented the first of those services:

You call a telephone number and an automated response tells you how many pending orders you have and how much they are worth.

Continue reading ‘OSCT Project - The Automated Phone Assistant - Part 1′

You’ve got all the mods. You’ve implemented all the hacks. Your osCommerce store is more tricked out than a magician on steroids.

Now you’re looking for the ultimate in geekyness. Something that you don’t really need but is so cool you just have to have it. The thing that will make your osCommerce buddies crumple to their knees and proclaim you as their new master.

Imagine if you osCommerce store could do this…

Continue reading ‘OSCT Project - The osCommerce Automated Phone Assistant’

If you have read my previous posts about Leapfrog, you will know that I am quite keen on Flex.

Flex is a new programming language by Adobe, developed to convince the world that Flash is not just about cartoons and animation.

It’s aimed at serious developers who want to harness the ubiquitous nature of the Flash Player, installed on over 98% of internet enabled desktops in mature markets (Abobe.com, 2006), and create powerful internet applications with beautiful interfaces.

This article ponders about the idea of creating an osCommerce store in Flex.

Continue reading ‘Musing About Flex and osCommerce - A Step Backwards or Leap Forwards?’

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.

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’