Please Help Posted May 24, 2004 Posted May 24, 2004 I have dreamweaver and I just aquired osCommerce. Can I use the two together and how difficult is it or will it be for me to design a e-commerce site with the two programs, and what is the best way to start. Any thing I should know or any suggestions before I get started.
Guest Posted May 24, 2004 Posted May 24, 2004 I also came to osCommerce with Dreamweaver experience. Dreamweaver, despite the improvements made in MX, is still only very useful for static website design. The deal with osCommerce is that almost everything (including page design) is locked up in PHP, so Dreamweaver won't be able to help you design the layout of the site very well. If you install a template contribution that will change slightly but still it's not going to help you with much dynamic web design. However, I still use Dreamweaver as a content platform for web design. I use it to view and modify my files (using the Source Code view) and then upload them. It's also handy for the Sync function. The way osCommerce does layout is kind of programmer-centric rather than design-centric, but again, I'd recommend the template contributions to help with that. It's kind of difficult to take a Dreamweaver site and put it in osCommerce. You'll have to manually tweak the design elements to get them to fit. I just started design from scratch. If you know PHP well you can savage osCommerce to fit a nice design but few are good at doing that (look at how similar most osC-driven sites are). Good luck, and let me know if you have any other questions!
Guest Posted June 1, 2004 Posted June 1, 2004 I'm evaluating the use of osCommerce with Dreamweaver as well ... do I take it that you should design the upper-level, static portions of your website and then hyperlink the controls to the osCommerce components to run? Is there a way to "include" somehow an osCommerce php page into a Dreamweaver HTML page other than hyperlinking?
azziman Posted June 1, 2004 Posted June 1, 2004 is it possible to use dreamweaver to make the layout and then insert the php tags in the correct area(s)???? any1 tried this? plz let me know. tia.
Guest Posted June 2, 2004 Posted June 2, 2004 azziman and sarsie, to build an HTML site and then hook it up into PHP and osCommerce would require a lot of effort. You can see what I mean by opening the source code to one of osC's files. The stock version embeds HTML inside the PHP or vice-versa, so extricating the pieces to hook up would take a lot of time. If this is your full-time calling for the next few months you might be able to manage it, given a solid set of PHP skills and great HTML design experience. Otherwise this would be quite a challenge for someone not familiar with PHP.
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