What is osCommerce?

May 7, 2008

osCommerce (for Open Source Commerce ) is a powerful e-commerce and full-featured online store-management software program. It uses the Apache web server, PHP language and mySQL database and is available for free under the GNU General Public License. Websites created with osCommerce can be easily maintained and administered by a non-technical person using the Administrative interface and a web browser.
Source: Wikipedia

In laymens terms - osCommerce is tool that allows you to sell your products online, accept payments from Credit and Debit cards, manage product stock, and add new or modify existing products - without any technical knowledge whatsoever.

osCommerce is free to use, and to install. You can get more information, or download the source code here: download osCommerce.

Filed under: osCommerce basics | Comments (0)

Getting Shared or Dedicated SSL Certificate to work with osCommerce on 1and1

May 2, 2008

If you are having problem getting osCommerce shared SSL to work correctly on 1&1, there is some information in the osCommerce contributions section that will help you:

1and1 osCommerce SSL Fix

Filed under: osCommerce fixes | Comments (0)

Replace “Let’s See What we Have Here” with category names

April 23, 2008

Standard osCommerce has an odd ‘Let’s See What we Have Here Then’ message at the top of each of the category pages. See the osCommerce demo site to see what I mean. You can replace these messages easily with the following snippets of code:

Find and replace the 3 occurences of the following line on index.php:

<td class="pageHeading"><?php echo HEADING_TITLE; ?></td>

With:

<td class="pageHeading"><?php echo tep_get_categories_name($current_category_id); ?></td>

And then add this function to the bottom of includes/functions/general.php, before the last ?>

//
// get the categories name given the path
// by www.oscommerce-uk.co.uk

function tep_get_categories_name($cat_id) {
    global $languages_id;

    if ($cat_id != 0) {

        $category_name_query = tep_db_query("SELECT categories_name FROM "
        . TABLE_CATEGORIES_DESCRIPTION . " where categories_id='" . (int) $cat_id . "'
        AND     language_id='$languages_id'");

        $category_name = tep_db_fetch_array($category_name_query);
        return $category_name['categories_name'];
    } else {
        return HEADING_TITLE;
    }
}