Introducing the osCommerce HOT 100
Written By Gary on Feb 29 2008 · Comments (16)

I've been working on coding up a new twist on the "Lives Stores" area of the official osCommerce site.  I went through lots of shops over the past few days, trying to find those that have something exceptional about them.
So far, I am at 42 Stores which (in my opinion) show some skill with regards […]

Horrible or Awesome #3 - Optimise Your Images
Written By Gary on Feb 28 2008 · Comments (0)

Optimizing your images in Photoshop or another image editing program takes time - your valuable time. Just leaving them huge and making the customer download 3MB of images for each page in your site takes time too - the pesky customer's time.
Everybody knows customers love to wait to buy your products. Play a game! See […]

MySQL Server DOWN - oh no!
Written By Gary on Feb 27 2008 · Comments (7)

In the official osCommerce Forum I got into bit of a conversation with a Store Owner, part of the conversation was all about what happens if your MySQL server goes down whilst the webserver is still up and running.
For those who don't know, MySQL runs on it's own little server as part of the overall […]

Make A Comment, Ask A Question
Written By Gary on Feb 27 2008 · Comments (0)

When you are making a comment (on this blog) or asking a question (by email), please follow these "rules";

Be polite. 
Goes without saying.
Ask your question (or make your comment) usefully. 
Ask your question giving as much detail as you can, if it would help to show a URL, please do so.  If you give me […]

Horrible or Awesome #2 - Thumbnail Images
Written By Gary on Feb 26 2008 · Comments (21)

Why would you want to speed up load times for slow connections, or make your pictures look better? Good looking images are the sign of professionalism and class, and you surely don't want your site to have either of those.
Sure, successful shop owners say better images sell more products, but you don't have to listen […]

What Category are you looking at?
Written By Gary on Feb 24 2008 · Comments (2)

Sometimes you are not able to tell which Category you are looking at as the template that you are using might have changed (or even removed!) the Categories infobox. I've seen a few sites which use a horizontal dropdown menu (eg Easy Menu) which looks good, but takes away the visual representation of where you […]

FishEye Menu in osCommerce
Written By Gary on Feb 23 2008 · Comments (0)

I've been trying to break away from the standard "header, footer, 3 column grey layout" that osCommerce ships with out of the box. I find that particular look awful - and I would never buy a product from such a store. After all, if the Store Owner is too lazy to change the […]

Horrible or Awesome #1 - Leave the layout stock
Written By Gary on Feb 22 2008 · Comments (0)

Leave the layout stock
Because after all, if it wasn't the best layout of all time then why did they distribute it as 'stock' in the first place? Never mind that your site will look like every other lazy guy who decided that product presentation was overrated. Never mind that it has no flow, coherence, or […]

Version 1.2 of Discount Coupons and Gift Vouchers for RC osCommerce
Written By Gary on Feb 21 2008 · Comments Off

Just a quick post to let readers know that I have released version 1.2 of my Discount Coupons and Gift Vouchers contribution for RC releases of osCommerce.
This version fixes a bug in admin/coupons.php
http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/5743
For discussion/support, please see my original post about this.

osCommerce and Template Monster
Written By Gary on Feb 20 2008 · Comments (0)

Almost every day, there is someone in the official osCommerce Forum who is moaning about how they bought a pre-made osCommerce template from Template Monster.
Template Monster have loads of osCommerce designs available, but 99% of them are based on outdated osCommerce code.  The outsourced programmers used by Template Monster to integrate the designs have usually […]