I have revived this site in a static format - no new posts and no new comments. All my work will be posted on my main site: www.webdezine.ca . I apologize to anyone that attempted to access the site over the last 6+ months, but I abruptly returned to school which has gobbled up all of my free time. I will be around my webdezine site attempting to update the menu to work with Wordpress 2.3-2.5.

Thanks for all your support in the past

Best,
Sheri

Surfing this evening I see that I am not the only, hrmm… critical reviewer of osCommerce.

There are those out there that share my views with regard to the functionality of the e-commerce open source solution.

In the shopping cart revamp that I am undertaking I hope to address..no I WILL address the issues raised by this ever so subtle osCommerce review.

osCommerce lacks a client-side theme system

AGREED!! This has always driven me mad when dealing with this cart. I have in the past rewritten every page, spending hours on end attempting to find the containing table tags for each “if or elseif or else” so that I could turn the darn cart into something that didn’t look so CHEAP. In order to resolve this issue I will be using Smarty to separate the content from the design.

osCommerce does not have a well implemented OOP structure

Again AGREED!! osCommerce does not make good use object oriented programming. An example would be the box class. Here is some further reading about just what OOP is A-Beginners-Crash-Course-into-Object-Oriented-Programming Object-oriented_programming

Installing modules means editting osCommerce files

Does it ever! I can’t tell you how I came to depend on WinMerge when first attempting to customize an osCommerce site. This is not to bash the contributors at all, because hey I AM ONE, but it is the structure of the core script itself that creates the need to modify everything in every file. I still wake up with chills in the middle of the night.

osCommerce is very outdated

You betcha. It’s a dinosaur…until of course the next version comes out…but that has been promised for…a minimum of 2 years. Not likely any time soon.

The blog goes on to recommend Zen Cart .

While I have no experience with Zen Cart, the author of the post seems to be pleased with the cart. I’ll have to download it and get my hands dirty. From first glance I find it so difficult to understand why something which is hailed as a ‘better’ cart STILL uses that horrid osCommerce default design. After that much work to have it’s capabilities squash the osCommerce’s like a bug, one would think that theywould offer a default design that remained as far away from osCommerce as possible.

Customers don’t see how fabulous or horrible the code is but they do see colors and graphics.

After pushing myself through hours of monotony to reference all the queries, functions and definitions within osCommerce so that I could get a handle on the redundancy of the code I have decided to make an executive decision……..OUT WITH ALL THE JUNK. Goodness gracious, who needs a function to get a category id, then another to get a category name, then yet another to get the description of the category..wait, how about another to get the image associated with it. And don’t forget to get all the child categories of the one in question, oh and then count them in a different function……the list goes on and on. ONE FUNCTION WITH ONE QUERY is all that’s needed! (more…)

I am starting my journey in to the land of os ( commerce ) . While I would really like to get in there and take out all those nasty nested tables, the first thing I am going to tackle is creating reference files. I need to have handy the basic definitions, functions, queries and file structure.

Each file within osCommerce first calls ‘application_top’. Within ‘application_top’ comes the calls to every other file needed to make the script function as intended. It also makes use of the ini_get() function to determine whether globals or on or off—and it requires them to be ‘on’!! Argh.

Allowing the script to run with php 5 is at the top of the list of modifications to make.

You can tell just how very old this script is by taking a gander at this definition found in ‘app_top’:

define(’BOX_WIDTH’, 125);

This seemingly innocent little definition was created to control the width of the outer containing table cell for each and every “infobox” within the shop. Yup, the OUTER TABLE CONTAINER.

Take a look at this puppy (more…)