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I've taken over an OSCommerce. I've done some OSCommerce and do understand it, but I have little familiarity with the huge number of contributions and the side-effects of using them together. The site doesn't have some things it needs, but I've upgraded functionality sufficiently for the customer to use it effectively. Now, I need to take a look at longer range plans and determine which combination of contributions to use. Your thoughts and suggestions would be most appreciated. The most critical issue is the ability to add more than 9 extra pages to the site because I have some pages that need to be added and I don't want to clean up the extra pages that are there until I have decided whether to do the more-than-9-pages hack on Extra Info Pages or go to something else. I'm not particularly wedded to any of the contributions on the site except for STS and SPPC. I could even give up STS if there were a good enough reason, but I haven't seen anything else that does what it does. Here's the site for you to look at. Please note that it is in better shape than when I got it, but needs much more work. Also please note that the images are large because the owner wants them that way. Since I fixed up the category and product pages to handle the larger images, sales have picked-up, so apparently, he's correct. Xeonix Here are my thoughts on the subject. I would be most grateful for your thoughts and suggestions. I have some goals for the site and need to make some decisions before doing much more. I added a couple of contributions as quick fixes. (Define Mainpage and Subcategory Textboxes - because they were easy to install and I was confident they wouldn't scew-up other stuff.) It uses STS and SPPC, which are the only contribution I'd prefer to keep, so I'm going to layout what I need here: My concern is a set of contributions that work well together without a lot of hacking or side-effects. 1. I need to do the proper SEO URL and tag stuff: The site currently has Ultimate SEO URL's installed, but almost every option is turned off and I'm not going to start turning stuff on until I understand how I'm going to test it. (There's a history that tells me I need to be careful with this.) Site Needs a sitemap Bill Kellum, who has been very helpful, suggested HTC SEO Tools that transparently work would be better than one's requiring separate admin tasks to keep the content up to date, but not at the expense of reliability So, what's a good combination of SEO tools? 2. Site has significant editing requirements: We need more than 10 extra pages Currently using Extra Info Pages We could use the more-than-10-pages hack on Extra Info Pages Article Manager would do the trick, as a replacement for Extra Info Pages Article manager has the added advantage of built in cross-selling - which is the reason for the extra pages. Page Editor looks like it would do all of the editing, but again, it doesn't have the cross selling built into Article Manager. I think we can turn off dates, authors, etc. in Article Manager, so it could be used to create the needed extra pages that would look like pages created in Extra Info Pages. We're also using Define Mainpage to edit the home page from admin. Define Mainpage needs an html editor. We're using Subcategory Textboxes to edit blurbs on category and sub-category pages Subcategory Textboxes needs an html editor Extra Info Pages uses FCKEditor. Article Manager uses the HTMLArea Editor. We need to decide on ONE html editor which is reliable and easy to use The html editor should be one that can be easily attached to textboxes in the Admin area as needed. 3. Content Delivery Network We will be using a Content Delivery Network to serve the images Images will be pulled by the CDN. This requires changing image urls to the CDN URL. I haven't seen any contributions that support this Also, whatever is done cannot screw up the SEO stuff. 4. Summary: What contributions do we use for a complete SEO solution? Do we hack Extra Info Pages to handle more than 9 pages or go with Article Manager, or something else? If we went to Article Manager, will it allow editing of a section of the home page similar to Define Mainpage? We need one html editor for all admin wysiwyg editing tasks. Which html editor will work with all of the contributions it needs to work with? Are there other contributions I've missed that would work better than the one's I've mentioned here? [*}What about changing image URL's to point to the Content Delivery Network? No, we don't want to use Amazon S3! 5. Shortest Path: The shortest path could be to hack Extra Info Pages, pick an html editor and install it on Define Mainpage and Subcategory Textboxes. But, which html editor to use is the thing I'm most uncomfortable with. FCK Editor is already instealled, so I suppose I could dig in and figure out how to initialize it on the other admin textboxes that need it. But, that would mean giving up the cross-selling on the extra pages, which Article Manger has. So?????

You must be psychic. I saw no information about upgrading from an older version and you just provided it. From your suggestion, it sounds like there are no database changes involved?? On the STSv4.6.2 -- Will that be a simple upgrade from version 4.6, or should I wait? I'm in hurry if going from 4.6 to 4.6.2 is simple, I'm in wait mode otherwise. May I assume that 4.6 or 4.6.2 are good with HTC SEO? If not and I'm on 4.5.8, sounds like I want to stay there.

As an aside: How do I tell which version of STS is being used? When I do a search of the code, I see referemces to many versions of STS in the code. The most recent one is 4.5.5: /* $Id: sts.php,v 4.5.5 2006/23/09 22:30:54 Rigadin2 Exp $ osCommerce, Open Source E-Commerce Solutions http://www.oscommerce.com Copyright © 2005 osCommerce Released under the GNU General Public License * * STS v4.5.5 by Rigadin2, www.osc-help.net */ I'm guessing that's actually what this shop is running, but I don't like guessing... The site was built in the Fall of 2009, so it seems odd to me that it would use an old version of STS unless there's a compatibility problem with some other module.

I'll take a look at the HTC SEO. Thank you. This site is currently using an older Version of STS. I can tell that there have been changes to STS, but I'm sure they're not readily identifiable without significant work. So, I'll have to evaluate what has to be done to upgrade STS to the current version and whether that's practical within the time frame. The site has the Separate Pricing Per Customer contribution - which is really important to the customer, so I have to look at how upgrading STS impacts Separate Pricing.

Advice Needed! I've taken over a site which uses STS and Extra Info Pages: STS v4.1 extra_info_pages.php 4.50 I need to display a category or subcategory description on each category or subcategory page. The descriptions can be lengthy and osCommerce doesn't have a category description field - Which is one of the reasons STS was used in building the site. "Subcategory Textboxes" contribution seems to be a possibility: http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/4668/v,22 Subcategory Textboxes actually allows Textboxes on Categories, so it appears to do what I need, but I haven't used it before. I Need to determine whether I should use Extra Info Pages, since it is already installed, use Subcategory Pages, or something else. I'm hoping that folks here can look at my concerns and let me know whether or not Extra Info Pages will work without a lot of hacking, whether I should use the Subcategory Textboxes and be done with it, or know of another solution! Thanks,in advance, for wading through this and offering your experience. Since STS and Extra Info Pages are already in use on the site, I thought we could use Extra Info Pages to edit these descriptions, which would then be displayed on the individual category or subcategory pages, but Extra Info Pages is limited to 9 extra pages unless I modify it. I've found the information to do that and ti doesn't look like it would be difficult, but I am concerned that I'll get it done and then discover other issues using Extra Info Pages, since I'm not that familiar with it. The site is setup so that STS is serving an individual page for each Category and Subcategory. All of these pages are identical except for one area that contains a detailed description of the category or sub-category, perhaps some images, and links to other categories or products. There are about 50 Categories and Sub-categories and it is a growing number - which is a real pain in maintenance. It's really clumsy to edit an STS page to make changes to one small area of the page and it's dangerous for a non-techie admin who knows about paragraph and heading tags, and not much more. The site admins have been trained to download the STS page, load it in an external editor, and upload it back to the server, but it's error prone and time consuming to do it that way. Pros and cons of the approaches: If I use Subcategory textboxes, I'll have to update STS to serve the textboxes. If I use Extra Info Pages, I have to update it to handle more than 9 extra pages, and then I'm not sure what else I might run into. Extra Info Pages has the advantage of already having been installed and it uses the FCK editor, making it easier on the site admins. I'm also concerned I might discover other problems using Extra Info Pages, since I'd be modifying it to do something it isn't intended to do. PERHAPS, there's another solution I haven't found.

Installed latest version and have this problem: 1146 - Table 'test_oscommerce.eorder_text' doesn't exist SELECT * FROM eorder_text where eorder_text_id = '1' and language_id = '1' I've seen the comments about adding "Send HTML Email V2" - Is this the add-on that's needed? http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/1091 If so, there's more to the solution than installing "Send HTML Email V2" because this add-on doesn't create the eorder_text table. Which Add-On creates the eorder_text table and inserts the required data? I've even seen some comments here with the sql to create the eorder_text table, but if I simply add that table, I still don't know what data to insert. So, I will ask the questions that many here seem to want answered, again: 1. Do we need to install "Send HTML Email V2" and if so, is this the Add-On that's needed? http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/1091 2. Which Add-On creates the eorder_text table and populates it? 3. If the eorder_text table is not created by an add-on, then what data do we need to put in it?