jon_l

The contributions forum is one of the most popular here. There are so many posts it can be difficult to find what you are looking for, no doubt resulting in duplicate posts. Why not split this forum up, maybe in to 'contributions development', 'contributions support' and 'contributions general'? I'm sure it would make things a lot easier for everyone. Jon.

I'm looking at adding some form of admin authorisation to my install. All I want is to be able to set up a few users with passwords, all with full access. I've had a look at the contributions section and there appear to be at least 8 different ones. My apologies for being lazy but, to save me downloading and testing them all, could anyone suggest the best one for my needs? Thanks, Jon.

I was think the same about the search. We get a lot of people searching for a plural term, when the word is singular in our titles. Personally, I think we could do with a re-write of the search function, to cover this, and to search the categories themselves. However, this isn't going to happen at present so....to handle mistyped words you should be able to add a replace function to the search routine which would correct mistakes. Shouldn't be too difficult, its on my list but I won't be able to look at it for a bit. Jon.

This can all be done on a standard OSC install, except it looks like they have swapped the picture and descriptions round (they normally appear picture - description). All the settings are in admin. Jon.

When did you make the changes? It can take a month or so for the changes to filter through, as Google will have all the urls with session ids already in its index. If you read through all the Google threads, you will find all the information you need on this. Jon.

I just read through it again.... Why do you need to put the DIR_WS_IMAGES in to the database? This shouldn't be necessary, you should only need to store the actual image file name. Jon.

If I read this correctly....everything is working except for the insert? Are the rest of the fields being inserted correctly? Or is it just the image field that is not being inserted? Jon.

Let me know when you have the new version ready, and I'll have a play with it. I'm customising an MS1 install at the moment, so it should be a good test for it. Thanks, Jon.

I've installed the Categories Tab v1.3, and it is working fine. However, I'm trying to customise it a bit and it is all going very, very wrong. All I want to do is to add some extra tabs, to replace the navigation bar - with top / catalog .... my account / checkout etc. I am having big problems with this and I can't see why. If anyone has done this, or can supply the relevant code, I would be very grateful. I have spent many hours on this already.... Thanks, Jon.

The first thing to do is to get the admin screens running via SSL. - Is the site secure via SSL on the front end? - Why can't the back end be SSL? And if you haven't protected the admin directory, with .htaccess (or the administrators logon) then this is another priority - .htaccess would be the preferable option (though both is better). The other thing you can do is change the name of the admin directory. Make sure the option to email the middle section of card numbers is also active. You really do not want to send this information via email, even if it is encrypted. Jon.

Why do you need all that info emailed to you? It is all available online. Having it all sent via email would be quite a big security risk. Most users will just have the middle 8 digits from the card number emailed to them, then collect the rest of the details from the order online. Jon.

If you do a search on the forums you should find the answer, I posted a method of disabling the validation some time ago. If you can't find it, you just need to go through the validation code (no sure which file it is) and disable all the checks. From memory I think you can do it in the main cc file, as this calls the validation routines. Jon.

Is there any plan to come up with a version numbering system for contributions that will make it immediately clear which version of OSC they are for? Or will we just rely on this being stated in the description / notes? How about something like.... v2.2.MS1.xx With xx being the actual version number of the contribution starting with 01 and going up. Might make it easier to see what works with MS1, and what doesn't. Comments anyone? Apologies if this has been discussed before. Jon.

This has come up on the forums a number of times before, a simple search would find the answer. To answer it quickly though.... The easiest way is to change the products_date_added field in the products table. By default it selects the most recently added products. Jon.

Thanks for the quick reply and info. I'll check the mods out as suggested. Jon.

I need some advice on how to do something, I think the Credit Class mod might do the trick but wanted to check before starting to install.... What I want to do is to give a discount on the shipping charges, up to a fixed percentage of the total order value. So for example: - Order comes to ?100 - Shipping comes to ?20 - Final shipping total after discount should be ?10 If the discount comes to more than the shipping charge then the shipping charge should be ?0. I'd like this all to show on the checkout, so the customer can see the calculations. I'm ok with coding the changes but am trying to work out the best starting point. I'm sure I could write the changes from scratch, but a starting point, such as the Credit Class mod, would be a big advantage. Thanks, Jon.

Or another idea.... We launch our own auction site, with full OSC integration. There are a number of PHP scripts that we could base it on. When someone buys something it would just take them to the payment screens of the selling website. Plus it could check the stock in realtime. There could be an option within OSC to list the item in the auction site. OK, so it would be a lot of work but....if all the OSC sites supported it and directed traffic to it, it might work. It would be a good way to generate more sales for all users of OSC. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea. Though it is, just an idea. Jon.

Why would this cause problems? Surely all you pay eBay for is access to their API, you're not buying any code are you? The code written to access the API would be available for anyone to use and so would be under GNU/GPL. Of course you wouldn't be able to do anything with the code unless you paid eBay, but isn't the same true of the majority of the payment and shipping modules? I've used software that just parses the eBay pages. They seem to regularly changes things just to break them, but re-writing the parsing logic shouldn't take too much time. Can they actually stop you doing this? I don't rate the chances of eBay giving free access either. They'd lose the income, but more importantly they would lose control. Jon.

For some reason I thought the Header Tag Controller only worked on the <title> tag, when it actually does exactly what I wanted. Obviously I should of checked it out before making the post. Anyway, I've now installed it (very easy, though I did find the setup a little bit confusing, but there probably isn't a better way of doing it) and it works like a dream. Thanks for making the contribution.... Jon.

Is the ePDQ payment module going to be released as a contribution? I am looking at using ePDQ, but will obviously need the module first. I can't do much about it myself, as when I spoke to Barclays they said they will only release the technical information once the ePDQ account is opened. Catch 22. Jon.

Change line 87 to: print(" <a href="" . tep_href_link(FILENAME_PRODUCT_INFO, 'products_id=' . $this_products_id, 'NONSSL', false) . "">" . $this_products_name . "</a><br>n"); Jon.

Does anyone know if there is a contribution to dynamically generate meta tags for pages? I seem to remember one but can't find it. I am aware of the header tag contribution. If there isn't one for meta tags I imagine that the header tag contribution could be changed quite easily to do the job. Thanks, Jon.

Well....I'd call 30,000+ page hits (from 50 products) in the space of a few days, by the Google spider a bit of a problem. I will double check the bit on what Google follows in our web logs....however, this might not be a problem. If you disable indexing of shopping_cart.php in the robots.txt, it will follow the link but then won't do anything with it. So it shouldn't matter even if a session id is added to the url at that point. I think. This seems a nice and tidy way of fixing the problem. I reckon I've got a few weeks before it will be back on mass again, I'll try to get the changes applied before then. I've said it before, and I'll say it again....we really need something in the cvs for this. You don't realise what a problem it is until Google targets you. You get all excited to begin with, then realise what is happening. The worse thing for me is that it screws up all the counters (product views and page hits), making the data worthless. Plus of course the bandwidth (and we are talking lots). Thanks, Jon.

This might be a stupid question but.... Could a robot follow the 'in cart' or 'buy now' links? What would happen if it did? Could you expand on the currency setting issue? It didn't make sense to me. What should I look for and what shouldn't it be? Thanks, Jon.

I'm not sure this will help with the translation in to Dutch, but to answer your question on the origin....according to Encarta it comes from the Latin word affiliare 'to adopt as a son' and filius 'son' and has its origins in the mid-18th Century. In fact, I am now sure that this will not help at all. Jon.