Beginning the Adventure !

[TeRakau]

I have an osCommerce site up and running. The guy who did the store is now lost interest (grrrr). I have posted a query on this board a couple of days ago and got a response that helped me fix broken links. Now flushed with success I have decided to learn a bit more...My plan is outlined below - comments or suggestions would be greatfully accepted.

 

1. Understand the structure of osCommerce (ie what files do and where they are stored). Any pointers to documentation on this would be great.

2. Make an offline or online copy of my store, so I can learn without killing the original. What do others do ?

3. Buy a html editor - possibly dreamweaver and begin learning how to ... I say dreamweaver only because it appears to be the industry standard?? and I have CS2 as a design package.

 

Any comments will be appreciated

 

Thanks in advance

[MrPhil]

1. Good idea. There's a PDF around somewhere (documentation on this site?) that explains a lot, but it's a little long of tooth now.

 

2. Good idea. Just give its entry point an obscure name and make sure nothing links to it, so that Google et al. won't index it.

 

3. Don't bother. DW and its cousins are intended for WYSIWYG layout of HTML pages. osCommerce is written in PHP, which DW doesn't handle that well. You'd be better off getting familiar with a good general purpose editor, especially one that can recognize different languages (such as PHP) and do syntax highlighting, matching () {} [] etc. Take a look at ViM and Notepad++.

[bkellum]

I have an osCommerce site up and running. The guy who did the store is now lost interest (grrrr). I have posted a query on this board a couple of days ago and got a response that helped me fix broken links. Now flushed with success I have decided to learn a bit more...My plan is outlined below - comments or suggestions would be greatfully accepted.

 

1. Understand the structure of osCommerce (ie what files do and where they are stored). Any pointers to documentation on this would be great.

2. Make an offline or online copy of my store, so I can learn without killing the original. What do others do ?

3. Buy a html editor - possibly dreamweaver and begin learning how to ... I say dreamweaver only because it appears to be the industry standard?? and I have CS2 as a design package.

 

Any comments will be appreciated

 

Thanks in advance

 

 

Two separate parts of your shop; the backend and the frontend. The files in the admin folder control the backend while the rest of the files control your frontend.

 

If you create an online version, I agree with what Phil mentioned above, add in some code in your robots.txt file that would prevent any of the search engines from indexing the test site. You do not want to find links on Google that would send your customers to the test site. Google has information on how to do this and it is very easy to do. Basically, it would look something like this:

 

# This says to apply these settings to ALL search engine spiders/crawlers
User-agent: *
# robots.txt for [url="http://www.yourdomain.com/"]http://www.yourdomain.com/[/url]
Disallow: /testsite/

This code would not allow search engines to index the http://www.yourdomain.com/testsite/ and all pages within "testsite".

 

A good PHP editor is well worth the cost. I personally like the PHP Designer (Google search). You can use Dreamweaver but it would not bring in the features that a good PHP editor would provide. Dreamweaver would help you with the HTML portions of the PHP scripts within osCommerce if you don't know how to program in HTML. This would involve a lot of cut and paste from DW into the portion of the PHP script (the pages with the .php extension).