Contributions

[Guest]

As a newbee myself, I thought I could use contributions as a quick way to get my osC up and running. While contributions are a good thing in their own right, they definitely are not for us folks who have no programming knowledge!

 

Like drugs nowadays, contributions can cause more side-effects than the contribution is worth. I have come pretty far in understanding how the various elements in osC work, but not without having to go back and re-install pages and starting from scratch.

 

Having said that, the best thing you can do with your website is to BACKUP your database at least once a day. You can always recover your database if something goes wrong with a contribution install. You may have to re-edit some pages, but the time you save with database BACKUP is well worth the 30 seconds or so it takes to BACKUP.

 

Like all of us, I'm in a big hurry to get my website up and running so I can start marketing and advertising. The problem with hurrying is that I start getting confused about what I need to do first. What I need to do first is learn how osC works, even if it means delaying my website publication.

 

Contributions add a significant wall of confusion to the learning process, and while the authors are sincere in their efforts to streamline and enhance the osC storefronts, many times they unknowingly leave bugs in the contributions. Then people like you and I come along and get bit by those bugs and are left dazed, to try and figure out what went wrong.

 

My advice--as a newbee like you--is to stay away from contributions until you are comfortable with the elements of the basic osCommerce installation. You'll thank yourself in the long run!

 

Rock and Roll,

Frank :D

[Guest]

As a newbee myself, I thought I could use contributions as a quick way to get my osC up and running. While contributions are a good thing in their own right, they definitely are not for us folks who have no programming knowledge!

 

Like drugs nowadays, contributions can cause more side-effects than the contribution is worth. I have come pretty far in understanding how the various elements in osC work, but not without having to go back and re-install pages and starting from scratch.

 

Having said that, the best thing you can do with your website is to BACKUP your database at least once a day. You can always recover your database if something goes wrong with a contribution install. You may have to re-edit some pages, but the time you save with database BACKUP is well worth the 30 seconds or so it takes to BACKUP.

 

Like all of us, I'm in a big hurry to get my website up and running so I can start marketing and advertising. The problem with hurrying is that I start getting confused about what I need to do first. What I need to do first is learn how osC works, even if it means delaying my website publication.

 

Contributions add a significant wall of confusion to the learning process, and while the authors are sincere in their efforts to streamline and enhance the osC storefronts, many times they unknowingly leave bugs in the contributions. Then people like you and I come along and get bit by those bugs and are left dazed, to try and figure out what went wrong.

 

My advice--as a newbee like you--is to stay away from contributions until you are comfortable with the elements of the basic osCommerce installation. You'll thank yourself in the long run!

 

Rock and Roll,

Frank :D

 

Frank - of course.

 

There is no quality control whatsoever over a submitted contribution. This is good in that there is a fast turn around for submitted code, and this is bad in that anoyone and their Grandmother can submit code saying it solves work hunger - but all you can do it take their word for it if you don't know what you are doing.

 

People that get uptight about the "instructions" and "readme" files that get submitted with contributions need to realize that there is no verification whatsoever on WHO this person is - are they a good coder ? are they extending classes or creating their with unecessary overhead ? is their logical syntax correct ? is their process syntax right ? Is this the first script he has ever written ? yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda.

The list goes on and on.

 

My point really is that you cannot trust the person submitting the contrib - not even a little bit. And SOOO many people instal conrtibs oni live servers/sites with no application testing, let alone regression testing.

If you want to acheive something small like selecting different data and displaying a the field, or removing a small function within the OSC, then just go do it yourself - its not diffcult. People install the tiniest of contribs, or little bitty things, and then a year later things start to break and have no idea even where to look to start fixing the issue.

 

Corrie

[Guest]

My advice--as a newbee like you--is to stay away from contributions until you are comfortable with the elements of the basic osCommerce installation. You'll thank yourself in the long run!

 

I can give you an example why doing something like this can really waste your time.

Say you install the default osc and you insert few hundreds products. So everything is up and running and at some point you decide to have some distinct short description with your product listings. Now you going back to the catalog changing product by products. Then at a later time you discover that you could upload your whole catalog using easy populate. And you had an xls spreadsheet for all your products since day-1. But you did not use it because you didn't know about it and you copied/paste cell by cell.

 

And there many other cases where contributions can save time and improve your store. But of course I have to agree that is unwise to risk your main store if you're not proficient. So....you copy all your store's files/dbase into your local pc you do the installations/mods/customizations whatever you want, test them thoroughly and then once you're happy you upload all files. And setup the dbase accordingly. By doing something like that you can jump to the contributions right away because you're not risking your main store. Is that simple?