timmle Posted June 3, 2008 Share Posted June 3, 2008 Two Questions.. 1) I am a novice to intermediate website designer and this will be my first project with oscommerce and was wondering just a few simple things. I am looking to considerably change the design of the standard oscommerce site, and was wondering what is the best way to do it. I have Dreamweaver at my disposal and Adobe Photoshop also for my image modification. Am i ok to change the .php files in dreamweaver? I imagine that as long as i only modify the css stylesheets step by step this would not modify the scripting and the set up of oscommerce or any of the calling up of certain pages etc. I am looking to change the graphics considerably, and wondering if it is a reasonably easy process. 2) I am looking to have about 200+ items on the website as products as i will be selling spectacles in conjuction with an acutal store. How does oscommerce work in the way of creating individual pages for items? Is this done automatically via oscommerce and the database? Any Tips Or Advice? Thankyou In Advance. Tim Brayshaw Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
♥Vger Posted June 3, 2008 Share Posted June 3, 2008 You'll need Photoshop, and Illustrator would be even better - so that you can scale images up/down without losing resolution. Dreamweaver you can bin. You'll need a good plain text editor like Text Pad, PS Pad or Crimson Editor (don't use Word or Word Pad). To develop a dynamic PHP based website you don't want to be uploading files via FTP every time you make a change, just so that you can see what the changes look like. So what you'll need is to turn your PC into an offline web server (Intranet) by installing XAMPP (www.apachefriends.org/en) which is a1-click all-in-one Apache web server package, with Apache, PHP, Mysql and phpMyAdmin. Then you can install osCommerce on your PC and run it - doing all your testing offline and only uploading when it works. You need something like XAMPP because osCommerce requires a web server to run. Vger Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
redbone Posted June 4, 2008 Share Posted June 4, 2008 You may also want to take a look at the STS (Simple Template System) contribution Here It will let you create your look in dreamweaver and just add placeholders for the content, products, infoboxes, etc. Been using it for a few of my sites and highly recommend it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
♥Vger Posted June 4, 2008 Share Posted June 4, 2008 The problem with STS is that it does your search engine rankings no good - they don't seem to be able to handle it. Vger Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timmle Posted June 4, 2008 Author Share Posted June 4, 2008 Well i would firstly like to say thankyou as i was unaware i could emulate a server on my pc to do the testing which is going to be extremely helpful, so thanks for the heads up on that one. So when i upload the files to the real web server at a later date is it going to be messy, is there a lot of things i need to change to get it up and running? Tim Brayshaw Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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