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osCommerce

The e-commerce.

All Around Questions


ASherbuck

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Alright, I've been playing around for a couple weeks and making good use out of the boards and the beginner help.

 

At this point I have a few questions:

1. It seems so strange to me that 1 file holds the formatting for text, links, colors. Another holds the formatting for the boxes, another holds the text that populates them, another holds the parameters for which boxes belong where and then the column layouts are elsewhere. Is this for scalability? I understand that to create an infobox that looks different I have to create a whole new class of infoboxes and then have that infobox call that class. It just seems like to make changes to an isolated area I have to pop around to so many different files and it feels very foreign to me, (Little HTML, mostly VB background.) What is the basic setup for editting ?

 

2. My boss wants to know if he can use tools like Mac's IWeb to visually edit the site. To me knowledge there really isn't anyway to do that, plus I avoid Mac's like they're the plague. All I've found is you can preview your site locally if you setup apache, php, mysql. But no editors allow the drag and drop or highlight and change capabilities that some html editors allow for layout/text changes.

 

3. Pretty much, I've been going with the default setup and I made a layout in Photoshop. I've cut the images to fit in as backgrounds to effectively appear seemless. It appears that the site breaks down into html rows and columns. Is that basically it? Html rows and columns with a ton of PHP code filling them?

 

4. This sort of ties into #1, OSC layout basically functions as a skeleton frame for the site and then the php code "calls" or references the specifications set elsewhere to basically build a site at run time, for example for the languages?

 

I'm a little lost and spend a lot of time banging my head off the keyboard, like I said this is Greek to me because I have such limited understanding of structure and language. I hope I at least gave a vibe of what areas I'm lost in and hopefully someone has an idea what I need to read or lookup on to get a better understanding.

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1. This is MAINLY the reason for the text because it makes it easier if you are building a site in multiple languages. This way you dont have the re-write the ENTIRE site for 2 or 3 different languages, instead the language drop down tells the website while file to use that holds the defines for the text. The style sheet, on the other hand also makes it easier because most people want a uniform look on their site, so instead of telling EVERY table or line of code what font, color, size, background youw ant, you just call on a class. It keeps the site more uniform and believe it or not, it DOES make it easier to edit.

 

2. You can not use a WYSIWYG editor like iweb or dreamweaver to change the look of your site, you can only use teh code editors in each to edit the code. PHP is server side, which means it NEEDS to be on the server that is conntected to the database in order to look like what the code is telling it to look like (did that make sense?)

 

3. If you look in my signature, you will see something called ROAD MAP TO OSCOMMERCE FOR NEWBIES.. that will tell you kind of HOW oscommerce is set up.. btu in general, the MAIN page of oscommerce is the HEADER, COLUMN_RIGHT, COLUMN_LEFT, and FOOTER and the main content is different depending on the poage you are on. Those files i just told you are are in the INCLUDES folders, so if you want to see any code that is in those places, you can start there

 

4. i think i explained this when i told oyu about SERVER SIDE code.

A great place for newbies to start

Road Map to oscommerce File Structure

DO NOT PM ME FOR HELP. My time is valuable, unless i ask you to PM me, please dont. You will get better help if you post publicly. I am not as good at this as you think anyways!

 

HOWEVER, you can visit my blog (go to my profile to see it) and post a question there, i will find time to get back and answer you

 

Proud Memeber of the CODE BREAKERS CLUB!!

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