triplemaya Posted February 16, 2007 Share Posted February 16, 2007 This is a cry for help. I find the whole oscommerce context almost impossible to deal with. I am very grateful for the existence of this marvellous software, but it it like an alien culture to me. I am fairly sure that the difficulty lies in the basis on which it is constructed vs my thinking to date. I am an XWindow graphics programmer, and I have never done any database programming. I suspect that the folks who put together oscommerce are thinking in database terms, obviously. As far as I can tell, it is not just a differnt language , it is a different 'paradigm'. The problem I have is that all of it seems to be constructed in that mind set, and I just don't get it. I don't just not get it, my guesses are never right, they are not even in the right ball park, it feels as if I am not in the right planet! I think in terms of proceedures and events, and this software seems to be a vast lookup table - well, like a database - with no index, well, no index I can find or comprehend. This seems like a PEBKAC problem, but I just don't know where to start to fix it. Any (polite!) suggestions welome. (one thing I think would help enormously would be if there is a way to search the forum for key words in the title of posts. at present I seem to be able only to search for words in the posts themselves. if there is a way to do this would someone please let me know) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wheeloftime Posted February 16, 2007 Share Posted February 16, 2007 This is a cry for help. I find the whole oscommerce context almost impossible to deal with. I am very grateful for the existence of this marvellous software, but it it like an alien culture to me. I am fairly sure that the difficulty lies in the basis on which it is constructed vs my thinking to date.I am an XWindow graphics programmer, and I have never done any database programming. I suspect that the folks who put together oscommerce are thinking in database terms, obviously. As far as I can tell, it is not just a differnt language , it is a different 'paradigm'. The problem I have is that all of it seems to be constructed in that mind set, and I just don't get it. I don't just not get it, my guesses are never right, they are not even in the right ball park, it feels as if I am not in the right planet! I think in terms of proceedures and events, and this software seems to be a vast lookup table - well, like a database - with no index, well, no index I can find or comprehend. This seems like a PEBKAC problem, but I just don't know where to start to fix it. Any (polite!) suggestions welome. (one thing I think would help enormously would be if there is a way to search the forum for key words in the title of posts. at present I seem to be able only to search for words in the posts themselves. if there is a way to do this would someone please let me know) Look down for option to only search titles ie. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
triplemaya Posted February 17, 2007 Author Share Posted February 17, 2007 Thanks Howard, that'll help! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Velveeta Posted February 17, 2007 Share Posted February 17, 2007 Thanks Howard, that'll help! I've got a bit of polite suggestion for you... I come from a procedural programming background as well, and when I first started working with databases, it was a nightmare for me to wrap my head around the concept of normalization... I've since come to realize that it's really the only way to do things without duplicating data in structures :) I would suggest that first, you go out and read up on database normalization, the why's and the how's of it... Here's a decent looking article I dug up in a quick google search... Secondly, in standard application programming, you're concerned with events firing off different sets of functions, but the program loops always returns to a waiting state for user input, and the next event is fired off whenever they do something else... It helps if you think of the entire package of oscommerce as a single-execution-only program... All of the files in all of the directories are set to be 1 complete execution of a program from start to finish... This helps to keep you from thinking of it in terms of when they click on this, followed by that, and then click that, as 1 single click executes the entire program from start to termination, and anything you want done, you have to do in that 1 run... So the best way to learn, at least the way I did and I know a lot of others did, is just to jump right in and start reading through the code, following function calls to see where they lead, what they return, how that data is used to determine the next call in the program flow, what's stored in the session data for future retrieval, etc... Being that you're not a database person, I'm going to assume you don't have a great grasp on sql syntax, but if you ever have a problem getting a query to work right, or figuring out how to even begin writing it, feel free to post it up to the forums, where many of us are lurking to pounce on a problem :D Richard. Richard Lindsey Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
usernamenone Posted February 17, 2007 Share Posted February 17, 2007 The fastest way to find what you are looking for is to yahoo it. This works href="http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oGkj3QfdZFxa4A59hXNyoA?p=how+to+edit+index+page+oscommerce&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-t-501&x=wrt">How to edit index page oscommerce</a> The forum software isn't as good a search engine as yahoo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
triplemaya Posted February 19, 2007 Author Share Posted February 19, 2007 Thanks usernamenone Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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