Easiest way to integrate a blog

[longhorn1999]

Does anyone have any recommendations as to what's the best way to incorporate a simple blog into osC?

There seem to be 3 options from what I've seen:

 

wordpress integration

http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/6809

 

article manager

http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/1709

 

news blog

http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/4808

 

There are issues with each it seems with regards to header tags and SEO Urls. Also, with wordpress there may be issues with sessions being dropped.

I know that article manager is not specifically a blog format, but are people using it as kind of de facto blog? Any ideas?

[npn2531]

I think the Article Manager could be adapted in to a pretty decent, but basic blog for OSCommerce. The News Blog doesn't compare to the Article Manager. The Article Manager is a well written and much used program on OSCommerce.

 

Wordpress: You can get external programs like Wordpress to display within the OSCommerce programming, but it is still Wordpress on a different database and on a completely different set of files, and entirely different program. I apologize to the author of that contribution if I have misconstrued the program.

 

The Articles manager on the other hand is one and the same with OSCommerce. It is simply a few additional pages, utilizing the same database, programming, functions, etc, and is tightly crossed referenced to the products in OScommerce, and is on the same login/logout as the rest of the site.

 

I have a made a few tentative steps to make the Articles manager work more like a blog on my website. Essentially I have put the Articles listing in the right column with the individual article in the center section. If you click on an article title and summary in the right column, the article appears in the center section. This is essentially what a blog does. Just think of an Article as if it were a blog entry. Like a blog the Article Manager already has reviews and comment links, and a way to display the author and date.

 

When I go back to working on this I will put the Article on the front, or index page, instead of an interior page.

 

The basic technic I used to get the Article listing to appear in the left column, was to strip that page, articles.php, of

require('includes/application_top.php');

and

require('includes/application_bottom.php');

, which appear at the very top and bottom, and removing the <header></header> info, header, footer and left and right columns. Thus turning that page into something that could be inserted in a infobox that can be in one of the columns, or placed directly in the left or right column.

 

You can see the what it looks like here:

 

http://www.niora.com/article_info.php?articles_id=9

 

If you do any work on the Article Manager in this direction I would be interested in what you come up with. One thing that would have to be changed somewhat is how the comments, comments submitted and reviews would be displayed in relationship to the parent article.

[longhorn1999]

Yeah that was what I was really wondering about article manager, i.e., how comments would be handled with regards to articles.

I will experiment with this a bit and let you know. Thanks.

[longhorn1999]

http://www.dezignwithaz dot com/zee-blog-t-1.html

 

This site is probably one of the most-visited osC sites around. It was even featured in Internet Retailer a few months ago. Does anyone know what add-on/software is being used here for their blog? It seems to be integrated into their site perfectly where the header/footer/columns remain the same for the blog pages.

[npn2531]

The programming from three article manager pages, article_info.php, article_reviews.php and article_reviews_write, and the article manager infobox can be combined on the index for a simple blog. See an example at www dot niora dot com. Note the categories section on the left changes the content, or posts in the center, and each post can accept a comment thread. The posts and comments are managed from the article manager admin. It's not contribution ready but it works.

[LyleManagbanag]

Hi, for some reason my articles.php page is not retreiving my css. As seen here

 

https://www.stefan.com.au/shop/article_info.php?articles_id=1

 

Any idea why?