Administrator login missing

[xprt007]

Hi

 

It is quite a while back since I last tried out Oscommerce. In the meantime, I have been dealing with Drupal CMS & other similar systems, which compared to oscommerce I must say are much easier to deal with, especially if it comes to updating the theme & I guess other areas, because of the way they are coded.

 

Updating or changing a Drupal template theme as long as you have it uploaded to the theme folder just takes A CLICK & the whole site appearance changes at a ago, regardless of who made the theme. Further customization is also very easy via the theme style file, even for newbies. Updating & upgrading are also relatively easy.

 

Back to Oscommerce:

I have a shop I have to get a better template for from among the countless free themes online such as these at http://garcya.us/blog/13-free-oscommerce-templates/ for a client (probably installed from Cpanel Fantastico). (I tried other templates but no success, for different reasons)

 

In spite of trying to follow the countless tutorials around, it is not easy ... because the themes are often made differently.

I overwrote the current shop files & tried to "upgrade" as opposed to a new installation, but repeatedly got errors involving I think functions/database.php towards the end.

The site at the end was deformed.

 

After several trials with the different themes, I tried simply installing a new shop from scratch using the template files + new database.

This run well, but I later discovered whatever I did, the administrators link in the admin section was missing.

I tried uploading the files of oscommerce-2.2rc2a & installing. This run well. On overwriting these files with the preferred template files, the administrator links in admin area disappeared.

For all the 13 themes, installation when using only their available files ALONE would run well, but as said no administrators, meaning anyone can access the admin area.

 

I tried importing an "administrators" table from the original oscommerce installation, but going to shop/admin/login.php gives an error that there's no such a table.

 

So my questions:

• 
   
  
• how does one successfully install any of these 13 templates & also have an administrators option at the end??
  
• Is there anyway to UPGRADE the current shop without having to start from scratch?
  
• If this works only with an old version of Oscommerce, which one is it & where can I get it from in case the client wants one of these templates?
  
• Could someone recommend any FREE template site, which has templates that are COMPATIBLE with current or relatively recent versions of oscommerce and which dont merely have general instructions for installing Oscommerce, but the specific template?
  
• I saw in someone post some who had a similar problem being told he first has to upgrade the template files to oscommerce-2.2rc2a first & that it involves using Winmerge & etc to compare files & that it's time consuming task. Someone needed 5 hours. Is this all necessary?
  
• I keep seeing in zipped files of templates an "Extras" folder. What are its contents for & those are folders outside the "catalog" folder? Some have an "upgrade.html" file.
  
• On a side note: Does Oscommerce have any plans to grossly simplify life for its users by separating code dealing layout from the rest of the code, like in the given example of Drupal & other related CMS?
  To change the width of the site or edit the default template by changing its colors, etc involves changing countless files, which one has to find first ... :(
  

 

Anyway, I'd be grateful to get quick help to successful install at least of the mentioned themes or get some specific guidance to help deal with these issues.

 

Regards & thanks in advance.

[xprt007]

Could someone please help?

Apart from the 13 mentioned templates, I tried some others from different sources and got the same result. During installation using files that come with the template, no option to create an administrator and so the admin. area is open to anyone. If I first install a virgin nversion of oscommerce an administrator is created, but if i try overwrite these files with 3rd party template files, the administrator option disappears.

 

For those who know oscommerce, it must surely be clear what is going wrong here. May be there is some fundamental mistake made during installation that leads to this state.

 

I need an urgent solution & would appreciate any help.

 

Regards