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osCommerce

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transfer databases and contributions from one store to others


nicedeals

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Posted

Hi all,

I've had a website for over a year now and I've installed various contributions inc. header tag control etc and over 3500 products over the course of time.

I am now hoping to open 3 more shops via e-commerce and divide my products into 3 categories with a single website specific to each category.

 

- how do I imort the relevant products from my original store to each new store?

- how do i import the new contributions I've added to my original shop to the new shops?

- is the mysql databse for products accessible via FTP ( Filezilla ) and is it under admin section etc?

 

Any help is greatly appreciated. :thumbsup:

Posted

HI,

 

its fairly straightforward and i guess a lot of people use the technique for building new stores with a heavily modified oscommerce code. I know i do..

 

Make sure you ftp all of your files back to your computer.

If you also do a backup of the database in admin it should put a copy of the sql database in \catalog\adminbackups or whereever you have set the backup directory to be.

 

You ought to have access to something like phpmysqladmin - something you have used to make sql changes to your database and add contribs with ? Using that to create a backup of your sql is better, but should be the same as ftping the backup from the adminbackups directory.

 

so now you have all your files.

You can go through your sql database manually in a text editor if you want and cull information that way - or you can build three sites with your database copy then use the admin tool to make all your changes (like removing customers/orders/history etc).

 

I prefer to do it with a text editor - much quicker but you have to be careful you dont delete the wrong stuff !

 

Create your three new sites - make 3 new sql databases and assign three new userids and then create 3 local copies of all of your files. Edit your local files to make sure the \includes\configure.php and admin\includes\configure.php have the right info for url and sql user/password in them for each site.

 

copy your three new sets of files to thier respective server locations for the new sites.

restore the database to the three places - easier with mysqladmin tool - although you could drop a vanilla oscommerce sql database into each of the sites (actually do a vanilla oscommerce install i guess too).

( I would just use mysql admin to upload my tables with no data in them)

if you drop in a vanilla sql database, you should be able to uyse the oscommerce admin 'database restore' function to restore each of the the copies of the database too if thats easier for you - bit messy as you have three lots of deleting products to do manually now - hence why its best to clean up the sql file first..

 

If your sql file is that big, your mysql admin may timeout and you may need to split it into several files anyway. Just split it where a table definition finishes and not in the middle of one !

 

Make sure you setup the location of the cache directory on each site (otherwise you will have odd categories showing up when you think they have been removed/changed)), set file permisisons on the images directory, the backup directory, the graphs directory, set up your admin directory protection etc for each site.

and away you go !

 

its straightforward, just got to remember to modify each site appropriately and much easier if your sql file is clean of junk to start with.

 

there is a 'reset counter' contrib which is useful to reset the counter for each site.

Also problems with auto increment on tables you restore - so you may need to drop the orders table and reload it again so that your order numbers start at 1 again. If you use mysql admin to backup the database you have the option of choosing to do the 'drop tables if exists' bit first which will start the auto increment at 1 if the table data is empty - a minor issue so you can ignore if you dont mind your order numbers being high to start with.

 

thats about it.. just gotta customise each site again..

Regards

Mark Brindle

Posted

Thanks for that info..... very informative

i was wondering..what sort of conributions have you got installed....do you have a oscommerce template with decent contributions pre-installed?

Posted

I did notice your other post re buying some pre-made template..

i have stuff like:

 

ultimate seo urls, estimated shipping price, easy discount, review approval, actual attribute price, cool dhtml menu, thumbnail auto resize, sales reports, family products, bundled products, category discount (not working), category descriptions, dangling carrot gifts, percentage discount, froogle exporter, paypal ipn, customer exporter, must agree to terms, recover cart sales, rma returns, dynamic meta tags controller, all products, printable catalog, cheapest products, admin edit news box, external infobox for featured products, image on invoice, pollbooth, average customer rating, featured products, autologin (turned off as it clashes), visitors statistics (heavy on database ), random product infobox, low stock messages, customer testimonials in database to name most of them.

 

But i also have one problem i havent looked at too closely but need to address. Probably related to an old 'actual attribute price' mod - if you set qty for an attribute, the attribute is still available to buy even when its out of stock, the whole product goes out of stock when all the attributes are sold, so it should be fairly easy to find. Just havent needed to worry about that one for a while.

 

i dont have gift vouchers or any other billing modules, just free gifts via the dangling carrot mod.

Easy discount is hard coded discounts (the only way it works), category discounts is nearly working fully but stopped work on this recently due to lack of desire from a customer for it.

 

So thats about it. PM me if you want to discuss it more and i can provide a few site links.

Regards

Mark Brindle

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