Topic: Almost finished with the last project...

What have I been up to lately?
I've been setting up an oscommerce-based site/webshop for a client of mine and it's getting close to completion now, just thought I'd throw it up to show you what I've been up to lately. Don't expect any major changes since it's close to going live.

Please, please don't sign up or place any orders that you won't honor, this site is live!

The site is as I said based on www.oscommerce.com milestone 2, some contributions are installed and some custom mods have been made esp for the client, examples are more general information pages that now can be edited through wysiwyg from the admin.

For the non-swedish speaking (almost the lot of you I guess) the site sells professional woodworking hand tools such as saws, chisels, planes and much more. It's actually a huge market and up til now the only way to get the stuff you want here in sweden is to order from different manufacturers from europe to the US to Japan, quite cumbersome for a small business or a private person.

This client has long term plans, one of them is to integrate a membership section offering tutorials, videos, instructions, possibly even an eLearning section as well.
If it takes off it will be some interesting jobs ahead with this for me

What lacks at this point is translating some texts to english and adding more products, he's got all the biggest and best suppliers lined up and ready to sell through him.

It's been a cool job up to now and I've learned a new product while getting paid

(bloddy h*ll, forgot the url...)
http://www.tools4wood.se/
/Dan

{cell 260}
-{ a vibration is a movement that doesn't know which way to go }-

(Edited by DmS on 04-27-2004 13:37)

Very cool, DmS!

I'm actually just starting to work on an OSCommerce site for a company that sells tactical equipment. We'll have to compare notes...

No prob Pat, you know where to find me
/Dan

{cell 260}
-{ a vibration is a movement that doesn't know which way to go }-

well... not knowing anything about osCommerce, but having seen it used as an open shop system -
Dan, how difficult would you *think* it'd be to integrate osCommerce into a a CMS that 'publishs' it's page to a live server (and is capable of creating arbitary) files and can remotly, securly, load administrations pages from the live server?
Just a rough guess is all I need, how fixed is the layout, is it more than 20 gazillion files, etc...

Thank you,
TP

PS: The site does look nice. The copyright probably should not rest with osCommerce, should it? (Footer)

TP
While osCommerce is used on appr 1400 live shops and feels quite reliable in the role it's built for, it does have some serious shortcomings "out of the box" so to speak when it comes to extending/modifying/integrating it in different situations.

A couple of things:
- Relies on register_globals = on
- uses global variables a lot
- multilingual pages/texts are not stored in db, it's files holding constants with the texts
- it uses OOP for some HTML-generation & the cart, and procedural code for db-access & most logic.
- SQL is generated "everywhere" in different places
- No templating to speak of, to change the layout you need to change several (5-10) files with HTML + PHP
- To add a new text page to the site you need to modify the header-include for the menu, the page-listing file and add one page for each language holding constants for the text (I probably forgot some steps here)
- It really lacks in code documentation

There are advantages though, it has an extensive admin interface for product management, clients, orders, newsletters and things like that. There are a lot of contributions created, some sort of template system is available as well (which I havn't tried).

In short, it takes some time to get to know the code and the thoughts behind it, once you get that, it's workable but not very flexible. The main reason we choose this tool was to get the shop up & running quickly. Had I done this myself a lot of the things that's placed in files now would be in the db, all the db-access would be separated from the business logic and there would be some sort of simple templating system, that's for sure.

So, I guess it depends on what you want to gain from the CMS integration, it would probably be doable to "insert" the shop into a site powered by a CMS leaving navigation, header/footer and so on to the CMS. To lose the boxy look you'd have to get into the classes that generates the "boxes" and do something else instead.

If I understand what you'd like to do, I'd guess you'd be looking at 2-4 weeks full time work for a simple integration. I've put 60 hours into this and that includes install, configuration, css, images, installing contributions and adding the extra-pages modification.

If you can take a 3.6 Mb mail I can send you the .chm file I generated, that gives a fair idea of how much code it is.
/Dan

{cell 260}
-{ a vibration is a movement that doesn't know which way to go }-

hm... that's what I feared - 2-4 weeks full time. Ug. But around that was my (non-profissenional) guess as well

Please send that mail,emailaddress should be in my patient file, and my mailbox should be able to take it.

I'd much rather find an 'easier to integrate' shop system, though, for it seems, I'm the one who's gonna be stuck with this job in the company. Maybe I'll be able to argue that osCommerce is to expensive to integrate, with the help of your document.


Thank you,

->Tyberius Prime

On a completely off topic note. I went to visit dmsproject.com (much much nicer than I remember that ways years ago though) and I found that whenever I mouse over a link both the welcome and latest articles jump up into the "pure content" area. I have no idea why this would happen. I am using FireFox on FreeBSD, but I have never seen anything like this before.

Ok, TP, the mail is on the way.
Before you decide, download the milestone, install and play with it to see the features and esp the admin system.
These parts are quite powerful, esp together with the available contributions from the community (which is big and helpful btw). You'll get it up and running within 20 minutes. If nothing else this will give you a fair idea on what to look for in another solution.

WarMage, thanx, I've reworked it quite a lot the latest year.
The link jumping... Interesting, I've tried & tested this in a multitude of browsers on mac and pc (not *nix though) and while there are some differences, nothing like what you describe shows up... In FireFox 0.8 on PC it's even more solid than in IE... I know that in IE there are some wierdness going on with the inline links which I suspect is a padding and/or some collisions in the styles. Wierd!
I guess I'll have to clean up the stylesheet after all...
/Dan

{cell 260}
-{ a vibration is a movement that doesn't know which way to go }-

thanks - mail made it, and I'm looking into the chm right now.