Building Carts Offline And Other Questions

[dan-m]

Hello,

 

I am new to the forums and to osCommerce, but not to web design in general. Forgive me if this has been "asked and answered". I did a couple forum searches without luck. Here is my situation:

 

I have installed the osCommerce cart via my host's control panel, including PHP4.4.6 and mySQL 5.0.27 (apparently they recommend against using PHP 5.8.8, which is the other option). I have gone through most of the admin pages and gotten things more or less where I want them. My concerns are:

 

a) it's going to take me a few days to get the cart to look like my home page, and in the meantime I don't want people to find / hit my unfinished cart pages. So, is there a way to have the osCommerce files on the server, but not available to the general public? Or is the common course of action to tweak everything locally, then preview?

 

b ) If the latter is there a way to get them to show up in design view in Dreamweaver? Even though the code is accessed easily enough, the Design view shows a white page for everything.

 

c) I notice that when I jump from a secure admin page to the catalog page (when I've previewed online to this point), then going back to the admin page removes the secure link. Is this normal / expected?

 

 

Thank you in advance for any advice you can provide.

 

-Dan

[spax]

a, A few choices for this. If you have kept the catalog directory, you could password protect it so only you have access. Or, if osC is in the root, you could just have a static index.htm page there so only you know of index.php and the cart's existance - you could do that if you have the catalog directory also. Or, you could install the Simple Down for Maintenance contribution which can allow only yourself to see the store.

 

b, A lot of people do there modifying/editing offline as it can be simpler than using FTP. To view PHP pages though, you will need a server running locally on your PC. You will also need PHP and MySql installed. If you go and grab XAMPP, it will install Apache, PHP, MySql and phpMyAdmin for you, with minimal fuss. With XAMPP, you either get with it or as an add-on (can't remember which right now) PHP4 so you can switch between 4 and 5.

 

c, When you say secure admin pages, do you have SSL or do you mean the admin is password protected?

[germ]

I'll throw in my 2 cents, on two of your questions if you don't mind.

 

a) it's going to take me a few days to get the cart to look like my home page, and in the meantime I don't want people to find / hit my unfinished cart pages. So, is there a way to have the osCommerce files on the server, but not available to the general public? Or is the common course of action to tweak everything locally, then preview?

Two ways around this.

1. Create an "index.html" file and place it in the root folder of your site. When your Host setup your site, they probably put one there for you. The server will show the "index.html" file instead of the "index.php" file if they just type in: www.yoursite.com . To actually see the index.php, they'd have to type: www.yoursite.com/index.php . NOTE: THIS IS MAY ONLY BE TRUE FOR UNIX SERVERS AND MAY NOT WORK ON WINDOWS BASED SERVERS.

2. Temporarily rename your index.php file to something like testing.php. The only thing that won't work are any "Home" links.

 

While I was developing the site I've been working on, I renamed index.php to something else, but also left the index.html the host put there. When we decided to "go live", all I had to do was rename index.html to something else, then rename the osCommerce PHP file back to index.php

 

b ) If the latter is there a way to get them to show up in design view in Dreamweaver? Even though the code is accessed easily enough, the Design view shows a white page for everything.

I can't say about Dreamweaver, but they don't show up in FrontPage. That's because most of the "stuff" in there is PHP code. I assume from your question that Dreamweaver is as bad as FrontPage when it comes to PHP code.

<_<

[dan-m]

Thank you both for your input so far. Seems the more I read these forums, the more questions I have but it's good to have some first-hand advice.

 

1) As far as the Catalog folder, it is contained at the root level of my site by default. I guess I am more inclined to just lock the folder down to keep things simple. Regarding the server, it is LINUX-based AFAICT. For the future I'll check out the Site Down contribution (thanks for the tip!). Which leads me to my first follow-up question:

 

I read in a different thread that some people recommend, if you have an existing site and design, that you start over(?!) when integrating an osCommerce installation? Something about back-tracking will kill the session ID and empty the cart? I just spent a lot of time and effort over the last couple months to get my site in shape, and was hoping I could add the cart pages (once finished) by linking into the catalog directory, etc.

 

What are your recommendations? Obviously security and user-experience are top priorities, but redesigning my entire site based on the pre-defined structure of osCommerce is not a pleasant thought. I don't know PHP well enough to design all my other (non-cart-related) pages from scratch... so what next? Basically the entire site is CSS-based, AP layouts, with some javascript here and there. Is it just a case of re-doing the header code and bringing everything inside the catalog?

 

2) Regarding XAMPP, will it matter if the version of PHP it installs (even if 4.x) is different from the one on my server, or mySQL for that matter? I want to make sure any testing I do won't be for naught, simply because a few of the files on my server are different and/or some of the functions deprecated, on the newer, local version XAMPP might install, etc.

 

3) Regarding the admin, by secure I mean the Gold Locket in the bottom left hand side of the Admin Home page says either (paraphrasing) "This session is secured by an unknown SSL (it's shared) account" or "This session is NOT secure". I can start with one, jump to the catalog to test and when I go back I'm no longer secure. Probably I can make this aspect moot by testing everything locally but it's worth knowing.

 

4) And re: Dreamweaver, yes, it's because the files are PHP. I was just wondering if someone had a trick to circumvent that so the page content displays in Design view. Sounds like not... <_<

 

Cheers,

Dan

[♥Vger]

I just need to clear one thing up. Many people come here saying that they have designed a website and just need to plug the osCommerce shopping cart into it. This is not the correct way to approach things. As I said in another post to you osCommerce IS the website - it's not just a shopping cart.

 

And "Yes", if people flick back and fore between osCommerce and an html based website then their session id will get dropped, their cart will be emptied, and they'll get logged out.

 

What you can do if you want to use an html design you have made is to use the Simple Template System (available from Contributions) which gives you an html overlay into which various php elements are pulled in. You can use your html design in this overlay. However, you should be aware that STS will cause some problems further along when you wish to add other 'contributions' to enhance the functionality of your website. There are published fixes for most of those problems, but you will need to search for them.

 

The latest version of Adobe Creative Suite (CS3) Premier Edition with Dreamweaver 8 does have some kind of server built into it. But I chose not to install that element as I already have a web server running - so I can't really advise about that.

 

Vger

[dan-m]

I just need to clear one thing up. Many people come here saying that they have designed a website and just need to plug the osCommerce shopping cart into it. This is not the correct way to approach things. As I said in another post to you osCommerce IS the website - it's not just a shopping cart.

 

Thanks Vger. I definitely want a secure process throughout so I'll do what I have to in order to make it work. Just trying to avoid unnecessary work by looking into it ahead of time. Is it the case that the session is lost, because of *where* all the other XHTML/CSS files are store, and because they are encoded as XHTML and not PHP? IOW, is there a simple way to take an existing site, change the header information in all the files, resave as PHP, place them in the correct directory, link things up as usual and thus avoid the lost session / cart problem?

 

What you can do if you want to use an html design you have made is to use the Simple Template System (available from Contributions) which gives you an html overlay into which various php elements are pulled in. You can use your html design in this overlay. However, you should be aware that STS will cause some problems further along when you wish to add other 'contributions' to enhance the functionality of your website. There are published fixes for most of those problems, but you will need to search for them.

 

OK. I'll check this out. Hopefully it's flexible enough to allow for different types of auto-centering, AP designs, and doesn't require everything be reimplemented in PHP.

 

The latest version of Adobe Creative Suite (CS3) Premier Edition with Dreamweaver 8 does have some kind of server built into it. But I chose not to install that element as I already have a web server running - so I can't really advise about that.

 

Hmmm. I do have this version so maybe I missed something. I'll see what the Help files turn up. Usually not much.

 

-dan