6 replies to this topic

[kantarou]

Hello all

For a number of years now i've been using osCommerce for a number of customers, refining the 2.2RC2 with each iteration. Despite all the funkiness I grew to like it a lot, and now that I actually tried Magento CE (a daunting, gut twisting experience, RUN Forrest, RUN!) I appreciate osc's straightforwardness even more.

That said, I want to share my newest project: w w w . m i k r o e l . e u (please remove the spaces in between letters).

There is a great number of modifications there and I'm sure that even though there is much more to do and many bugs to fix, many users might benefit from certain changes, so feel free to ask about anything if interested.

The most important features/changes;

• database and codebase all in utf-8, fixing problems with searching for items with weird characters in names,
  
• store generates modern html5 code, based on <div's>, new, more sensible and uniform classes, id's of elements and CSS to match,
  
• heavily relying on STS Template System, with small fixes getting rid of tables once and for all,
  
• static pages, homepage slideshow, additional boxes - all manageable comfortably by the client via the Article Manager contrib with Tiny MCE Editor, expanding osCommerce a little into the realm of more robust CMS's,
  
• Security by FWR addons,
  
• SEO by SEO URLS by Chemo and SEO Header Tags by jack_mcs,
  
• Reviews integrated with product info pages, all old review logic & pages scrapped,
  
• Scrapped hardcoded email code, moved to a new, simple HTML templates for emails, with simple placeholders in .html files,
  
• Scrapped old notification system (ticking boxes after placing order) - users now can subscribe via the product info page, and manage that via their account settings,
  
• Newsletter generated for users based upon what they actually ticked, preview in admin with ability to edit text,
  
• AJAX search respecting different languages,
  
• Consolidated and cleaned-up user registration / address book / account edit forms (that were all over the place and somewhat rusty). Improved, regular expression based input validation,
  
• Many other fixes and changes.

So that's that. I'd be glad to know what you think

Edited by kantarou, 08 July 2012 - 04:00 PM.

[DunWeb]

@kantarou

RC2a based ?  Why would you waste your time working with an out-dated version of osCommerce ?



Chris

[kantarou]

Well, I updated it in the meantime to v 2.3...

[DunWeb]

@kantarou

A hybrid v2.3 store is more unstable than an RC2a store.  I suggest re-creating the site using v2.3.1 for the best quality and stablity.



Chris

[kantarou]

This is good advice that I'm well aware of, however it's a little bit off topic, won't you agree?

It's difficult to me to start from scratch because of all the time that I committed to this version, and since I'm not experiencing any problems I can't handle with my other stores, I plan to follow your advice only after a more complete v3 is released

[burt]

I like the look very much.  Clean and modern.

I wonder why you used STS ?  What is the reason for that?

[kantarou]

Thank you Burt

At the time the best two solutions I could find were the STS and BTS contributions. I chose the first. Today I use only its main, vanilla functionality by assigning box or module I want to use (for example a /includes/boxes/facebook.php box) a placeholder and putting it in my layout. I can hardly think of a more flexible way and in fact never looked at another template contribution since. I had to modify the STS class a little bit, because it expected the content it extracted from oscommerce files to be inside a table (now it looks for the <!-- body start --> marker).

You seem surprised. What better template solution do you recommend?

Edited by kantarou, 08 July 2012 - 07:26 PM.