Installing osCommerce on your own home computer
Written By Gary on Apr 29 2008 · Comments (7)

Recently I've been seeing lots of requests for instructions on how to install osCommerce on your own home computer.  There are lots of good reasons why you should do this;

You can test out new contributions easily before adding them to your live store
You can make a design without affecting your live store
You can just see […]

eBay is hard work!
Written By Gary on Apr 28 2008 · Comments (1)

I haven't used eBay for a very long time other than buying the odd item here and there.  In the past couple of weeks I've been using eBay to sell a couple of my osCommerce related products - it's taken me 2 hours to get the the point where I've got a live listing.
For starters, […]

Making a design work in osCommerce
Written By Gary on Apr 25 2008 · Comments (7)

I thought it might be interesting for you guys to see how I make an osCommerce site. What I do is pretty simple and I do this for every site I built since 2000…
Step 1 is to sketch out my design on a piece of paper - here's a REAL example:

Sorry about the quality […]

Clear Cart, then add a product automatically
Written By Gary on Apr 24 2008 · Comments (0)

Frank asks;
I'm trying to create a page that when someone visits; automatically empties the shopping cart and then adds one specific product, so the cart will only have that one item whenever the customer loads that page.
I thought this was an intelligent and interesting question - and as no-one else was helping, I decided to [...]

Making Templates
Written By Gary on Apr 24 2008 · Comments (0)

David asks;
I am very interested in designing oscommerce templates and installing contributions. I dont know how the system works and would really like to learn. I have every adobe product so all I need to know is what files must be edited to change looks.. thanks
David, the best advice that I can give is to [...]

Information Pop Up - Cool Feature
Written By Gary on Apr 23 2008 · Comments (5)

I've been trying to make the front page of osCommerce a little less intimidating - it's my opinion that a typical osCommerce store is too "busy". What I wanted to do was find a way to have less information in the page, in other words make the page more bare.
A good way to do [...]

Your Contact Details
Written By Gary on Apr 22 2008 · Comments (2)

Customers never want to get a hold of you - that's why they buy online! Plus, if they have a complaint they have no way of getting in touch with you other than email, and we all know how easy to forget that form of communication is.
Just think, without them knowing who you are, where [...]

Finding Text that you want to change
Written By Gary on Apr 21 2008 · Comments (0)

osCommerce is set up a little differently to a "normal" website.  Put simply, this is because the "base pages" are the structure and "language pages" are pulled into the structure automatically.

index.php
product_info.php
and all the rest of the pages

are your "structure pages" - these should only be amended if you are adding contributions or changing the actual [...]

Random Products on Front Page
Written By Gary on Apr 18 2008 · Comments (0)

Almost daily, I see this question asked in the osCommerce Forum...
How can I have 9 random products showing in the the "New Products For..." box in the front page of my osCommerce site?
The answer is really, really simple - you need to change the SQL that selects the 9 products, like this;
Open up /includes/modules/new_products.php
Find:
PLAIN TEXT
PHP:

p.products_date_added [...]

OMG - what do i do now?
Written By Gary on Apr 17 2008 · Comments (8)

Mario asks;
I have absolutely no knowledge of wed site or design but I have the task to set up a website from scratch.  I have been introduced to OSCOMMERCE but I have no idea of what to do with it. So far i downloaded the program from the site, but I already know i shouldn't [...]