The other day, I was asked about the possibility of including a time selection field in the shipping page of an osCommerce site. A typical example would be a delivery service such as a flower shop.
This is very alike my previous code for selcting a delivery date which works well. Basically, all I [...]
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Delivery Time in osCommerce
Quite a while back, I was part of a discussion on a forum (not the osCommerce forum) about Jakob Neilsen's ideas on password masking. You can read Mr Neilsen's thoughts here).
My idea was that his thoughts are valid, and are based on usability. My opinion is that 90% of users don't need to [...]
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Password Masking osCommerce
Had an interesting puzzle presented to me the other day. Basically an osCommerce store owner wanted to have two prices of products. In other words;
- the standard price
- a “friends and family” price (% reduction)
My idea was to simply use a Coupon Code to get the % reduction, then amend the display_price to [...]
Originally posted here:
Two prices per product in osCommerce
Looking at the up-to-date version of RC3, and I spy more new things;
Ability to change the admin directory name as part of the installation procedure:
We've all seen the recent eval problem that has been doing the rounds. Changing the admin directory to a completely random name is a great way to help guard against this. Would be nice to have a “make random name” button here. I might code that up later.
Admin access attempts are now part of the new Action Recorder feature:
and
I previously blogged about the Action Recorder here. You can see that we can now set the number of access attempts and number of minutes between login attempts.
Warning about configure file being writable is now also in the Admin Area:
This should help to make users more aware of what they need to do “next”!!
File manager has now gone:
We all know that the File Manager was a risk, not only because of the recent round of hacks but also because it broke files when saving them. Removing this is a great move.
There's more stuff, which I'll blog about again later.
The rest is here:
More new goodies in RC3 osCommerce
Someone wanted the ability to add in a “view all” link to the results page of the advanced search in osCommerce. As I’, one for doing things in the simplest way possible, my idea was to simply add a new link saying “view all”, which when clicked will reload the page without the listing_split.
Easy as 123. Here’s the results in action:
Please note that for this example I changed the max listing of search results to just 2 – to more easily show the paging and view all effect. Yours is probably set at 20.
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View All link on advanced_search_result.php in osCommerce
I wanted to make a little experiment to show the possibility of using a small piece of javascript to show the textual input in an osCommerce product_info.php page. Anyone using osCommerce will know that text inputs is not possible in standard osC 2.2 releases, though it will be a standard feature of v3.
As I’m running 2.2 for this project, I had to install “option types v2″, which did not take very long at all.
I then set up a “slogan” text input attribute and applied it to a product. All easy.
My idea was to somehow have the text appear as the person typed in the slogan – I thought it would be a fun project to code and be useful to future clients.
Here’s the video of it in action… http://vimeo.com/8619844
The letters that appear are actually images, and the whole thing is controlled by a few lines of jquery javascript. I think it looks pretty nice. One possibility for this is for Tshirt sellers to enable buyers to write slogans. Instead of having the letters below (like I have in the video) it would be just as simple to overlay them onto an image of a tshirt.
Another possibility is for engraving of trophies or medals. I suppose really anywhere where a name is required to make the product!
Original post:
Text Product Attribute in osCommerce
Has anyone ever thought about renaming osCommerce page filenames and directory names and other things? This may be a decent way to solve some problems that osCommerce shop owners experience.
For many years, my own osCommerce store has had a different name for the product_info.php page, which has lead to greater SEO benefits. But that’s another reason…
For this post I am more interested in making osCommerce harder for a “hacker” to hack. For starters, read a previous post on this blog for an overview on some ideas and methods. Here’s some more ideas hunt google or the osCommerce forum if you need code examples on how to do any of this);
1. Why advertise that your site is osCommerce?
Of course, to the experienced eye, it is easy to tell whether a site is running osC or not. But why advertise the fact.
Is your site saying “powered by oscommerce” on it? Remove it!
Is your site using the oscsid variable? OSCsid – a small change, but well worth it? Why not change that to the zencart sid? Or creloaded? Or one of your own. It doesn’t really matter what you use for an SID – and it is easy to change in osCommerce…
2. Change the filenames!
Why would you keep the filenames the same as standard osCommerce? Of course, you’ll probably need to keep index.php the same in order for your site to show up when your URL in input, but even this is easily changable! As for the rest, it’s very simple. Rename the file, rename it’s corresponding language file, make the same change in the file at includes/filenames.php
3. Change the dirnames!
Change the Directory names! Why keep the name “includes” – it could as easily be “inc” or “incl” or “zippy” or “brian”. Just rename it and make the corresponding change in BOTH configure.php files.
I hear you saying, “that’s all well and good Gary, but what about contributions, won’t this break them”? The answer to this is maybe it will, if the contribution is not correctly written. The same goes for templates – if they are correctly written, they will still work.
Note that I am not saying that changing names of things is a great protection against anything, but if you make your website harder for a layman to know what software is running it, you MAY find they move onto the next website quicker, leaving your site alone.
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Rename osCommerce Files
An osCommerce Quiz for you to think about;
Interesting code question posed on the osCommerce forum so I thought it would make a decent blog post;
Are there any contributions out there which add product information fields in the admin section so that you can list the product as new, used, or refurbished?
Always self code if possible, it’s better and you learn a little bit about the osCommerce engine…
Step 1: Add new input fields to admin/categories.php
Easy enough, basically look at produce model, and copy the code but rename to product_type. Add an extra question in the form;
