osCommerce Templates

osCommerce and Accessibility

admin — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 15:02:18 +0000

It has been a legal requirement for UK websites to be accessible since 1999. All websites are expected to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ to ensure their websites accommodate all users, regardless of ability or disability. It’s estimated that at any one moment, 20% of online users are disabled in some way. This may be a temporary disability, such as a broken wrist, or a permanent disability, such as visual impairment. Just because someone is registered as blind, it doesn’t mean they can’t still see but perhaps needs to rely on a screen reader to help them with text on a website. If your website is not developed to respect this possibility then you are stopping this visitor from using your site, potentially losing a customer and every friend and family member that customer knows. Not to mention, they can make a claim against you and you could be liable to pay out compensation and be forced by a court of law to either remove or change your website.

Accessibility and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search engine spiders are programs written and ’sent out’ by Search Engines such as Yahoo to read and index your website into their search database. These spiders can be considered blind and deaf as they cannot read the contents of an image or a flash animation at present. Therefore by ensuring your website passes accessibility for the visually impaired and hard of hearing visitors, you ensure that the search engine spider gets the same information. This improves the exposure of your website to the spiders and will often improve the potential ranking and visitors via the search engines.

We offer two eBooks for sale which can give guidance and code on how to help you improve the accessibility and SEO of your osCommerce site.

Graphical Cover Creation Software

admin — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 10:37:01 +0000

If you sell digital products on your site such as eBooks or software, then I’m sure you know they sell better if you give them a graphical look. However this can be quite time consuming to do well. DIY Covers is a suite of photoshop actions to save you the time and effort and produce amazing results. You can create professional looking eCovers within minutes.

The price of this is $97 however for a limited period you can get it for $67 from AIS by Sarah. You can also get the trial version from this site, which includes one eBook action for you to try out and see how easy it is to use.

Losing Orders?

admin — Fri, 11 May 2007 21:59:10 +0000

Somehow, on occassion, orders don’t get through to the admin from the payment processor. I’ve managed to stop this myself with Protx by switching off JavaScript. I would have thought that Protx would update osCommerce automatically but it seems that it still requires the customer to return back to the website before the order is updated and my client is notified.

So with this in mind we needed something to allow her to view unpaid orders ie. orders that hadn’t officially been paid for but in theory should have because the customer clicked to pay. After a bit of searching and testing I came across orderCheck, a contribution which creates a temporary version of the customer’s order before they leave your site to pay. If the customer pays and returns successfully the temp order is removed and appears in the Orders section, however if something goes wrong the order is still clear to see in the orderCheck section. It’s almost identical to the Orders section and allows the client to update and ‘push’ the order through manually if and when needed.

We’ll be installing this on all the osCommerce stores we maintain, simply because it saves any problems and hassle of having to work through the database and the basket information to work out what someone’s paid for. Afterall it doesn’t sound professional having to ask a customer what they ordered.

Featured Products

admin — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 19:28:22 +0000

We’ve just finished redoing an existing site with a new design. Sometimes it’s harder working on an existing site than just setting up a new one, as the existing one tends to carry alterations and so you have more to work around. One option the client wanted was not to have new products on the front of the site but to be able to select which ones were displayed. After a quick search we came across the Featured Products contribution.

This is quite a nice contribution as it gives the owner a greater control over what their visitors see when they first reach the site (providing they enter via the front page of course!). I’ve not found any problems with it yet and it was easy enough to incorporate it into the new design.

New Site Ready for Launch

admin — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 23:22:49 +0000

Well the new site is finally ready for launch. We’re just waiting to hear back from Protx to make sure they’re happy with it all and then the site will go live. The client is a big believer in AdWords so the initial visitors won’t be hard to get. Hopefully if she can make a few sales and recoup the initial outlay of cost, perhaps next year I can SEO her site and make it more appealing to the search engines as osCommerce in its default form is not so great. I’ll be going into the various SEO updates that you can do to improve your website later.

Dynamic Site Map

admin — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 19:47:58 +0000

Today I suddenly realised the client had asked for a Site Map when of course osCommerce doesn’t come with one. A quick search on the osCommerce site and I came across Dynamic Sitemap. This is perfect for the job. I added it on within about 10 minutes and then ran through the configuration of the page. You get a page under the Tools section of the admin to allow you to choose who sees the pages within the sitemap, whether they’re not shown at all (such as the Checkout Success page) or whether they’re just shown to account holders (eg. the Lost Password page). The sitemap is printed out in two lists, one of the various pages available, all of your static pages plus the various cart pages, along with a list of all of the product categories. The anchor text for each page is pulled from the Header title defined under the languages/your-language directory eg. languages/english. All files within the directory are read and offered for the Site Map, and as they’re read every time, any new pages will automatically be picked up.

This is a pretty good way to get your site well indexed within the search engines. It gives them a page which isn’t using a dynamic URL (ie. a URL with a question mark and extra variables in) which they have more trust in. Then the search engine spiders will follow these links and get deeper into your site, indexing the category pages thus giving you more scope within the search engines.

Very easy to set up and a great feature to have.

Protx Module

admin — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 14:37:58 +0000

After a recommendation from a well versed osCommerce user I downloaded the Protx Form payment module and installed it on the new site yesterday. The form itself was very straightforward to add, however getting it to work with Protx is another matter.

I’ve configured it with the correct merchant name and what I believe to be the correct password (although this has come from my client so they may have their wires crossed) however on trying it out today I got the VSP Error Screen. Unfortunately Protx don’t seem to offer much info for the integration of their system on your website. I looked through their PDFs and couldn’t find the answers I needed, and the Protx form readme file doesn’t tell you much. So I’m a bit stuck at present and am going to have to trawl through the forums on osCommerce.com to see if I can find an answer, unless anyone here can give me one!

Sorting Attributes

admin — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 19:25:31 +0000

I’ve not found a built in way to control sorting the product attributes yet. There’s probably a contribution to do this however considering it’s only a single line change which took me about 5 minutes to find I figured it wasn’t a concern to find a contribution for it. At present there is no ordering of the attributes when they’re pulled from the database. Regardless of how you enter them in the retrieval seems to just randomly make its own mind up about how they should be displayed! When a client first brought this to my attention and said they’d been inputting them in the correct order, and the order of the attributes where in the same order as the order id’s (ie. lowest id for the first item and highest id for the last item) it made me wonder just how it was coming out. Usually when you run a SELECT statement in MySQL if you don’t give it an order it comes out in the row order. But at the same time this often isn’t the same order as the items were added.

Anyhow, so which line do you change? Under the products_info.php file find the line:
$products_options_query = tep_db_query("select pov.products_options_values_id, pov.products_options_values_name, pa.options_values_price, pa.price_prefix from " . TABLE_PRODUCTS_ATTRIBUTES . " pa, " . TABLE_PRODUCTS_OPTIONS_VALUES . " pov where pa.products_id = '" . (int)$HTTP_GET_VARS['products_id'] . "' and pa.options_id = '" . (int)$products_options_name['products_options_id'] . "' and pa.options_values_id = pov.products_options_values_id and pov.language_id = '" . (int)$languages_id . "'");

and at the end of the SQL statement add (for ordering by id)
ORDER BY pov.products_options_values_id ASC

giving you
$products_options_query = tep_db_query("select pov.products_options_values_id, pov.products_options_values_name, pa.options_values_price, pa.price_prefix from " . TABLE_PRODUCTS_ATTRIBUTES . " pa, " . TABLE_PRODUCTS_OPTIONS_VALUES . " pov where pa.products_id = '" . (int)$HTTP_GET_VARS['products_id'] . "' and pa.options_id = '" . (int)$products_options_name['products_options_id'] . "' and pa.options_values_id = pov.products_options_values_id and pov.language_id = '" . (int)$languages_id . "' ORDER BY pov.products_options_values_id ASC");

This method orders the attributes by id number, the number you see at the start of the attribute line in the admin section. If you wanted it ordered alphabetically you could use (untested!)
ORDER BY pov.products_options_values_name ASC

or by price
ORDER BY pa.options_values_price ASC

Altering the Product Display

admin — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 17:00:39 +0000

Despite buying a template for this website we’ve had rework the layout for the product display on the single page as well as every results listing. Due to the products my client’s selling, most of the images are long and thin as opposed to boxy. The original design had the image to the left and the text and price to the right, however with the long/thin images the text was getting pushed out of the fixed width design.

So last night and today I’ve been digging out the various files that are used for the product display and altering them to have the image first and then below the image comes the title, text, price and buy now buttons. On the results listings the image above and the title, price and buy now button on the line below. For the long and thin images this looks quite nice however for the few square images there are it unfortunately doesn’t look too great, however without a lot of rewriting of the HTML and adding in some CSS floats to control where the text sits depending on the image, then this is the next solution.

Pages I’ve had to update have been
product_info.php – for the single display page
bestsellers.php
includes/classes/boxes.php
includes/modules/product_list.php
includes/modules/new_products.php

I had to dramatically alter the boxes.php page, and copy the class usually used for displaying boxes into the product’s own class so that it could be amended just for the product display, as I didn’t know what else it would affect. The trouble was the products came out, one product per row with the image, title, price and buy now button each in a separate column. So getting a second row into the mix and making the first row span 3 columns, was the hardest part. After a lot of trial and error and a missing equals sign (sending the file into a neverending loop!), the products finally started to display correctly.

Unfortunately my client however has been uploading her image photos with a lot of white space on them. All of the photos are on clear white backgrounds however she’s not been cropping them down, so at present some images sit higher above the title and price associated with it than others. It’s also taken me 3 goes to explain to her that I cannot reduce the size between the product image and the text below it as there has been no padding or margins added! I’m hoping once she crops the images she’ll start to get the idea otherwise I’ll be outlining all of the images so that she can see where they start and end for herself!

Brief Update

admin — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 21:35:45 +0000

It’s been one of those months with no ADSL connection at home, and too many deadlines going on to really get much done on this site. Knowing my client still had plenty of work with adding the products her end meant I relaxed a little about the last few alterations for her site to get the other work done and out the way. However that’s all pretty much done now so it’s back to the site.

She mentioned to me last week that she has the option to change the product order on her other site, plus she wanted to offer a gift wrap service as well. So these are two more contributions I need to find along with working out with Protx module to install. Plus edit the product layout!