Cheri asks;

I have an extra text box on my index page and I would like to add hyperlinks. I'm told that the HTML may cause problems, including the possibility of my customer's carts getting emptied and/or logging the customer out. Do you agree with this? And what issues would forcing cookies possibly cause? Please explain in as simple terms as possible, I don't know code, etc. The store is doing pretty well right now and the last thing I want to do is chase away customers. I just think adding hyperlinks on the front page would make the spiders happy. And we like happy spiders

All you need to remember is that any links that go to other osCommerce based pages in your own site MUST carry a SID. Any links elsewhere, need not.

So, to carry a SID, use the "tep_href_link" function;

as an example. Note that in the example I have simplified a bit asyou would want to use the language definitions rather than just type "Shipping". But anyway, use the tep_href_link to other osCommerce pages and all will be well.

The tep_href_link function also accepts parameters - so if you wanted to link to a category you could do this:

Obviously in the example above we are linking to category ID = 24. You can pass more parameters as you need them;

In this one, we are linking the manufacturers ID and setting an action. The action is carried out as per the codebase in the the file we link too - in this case "FILENAME_REDIRECT" (aka redirect.php).

You can also tell the tep_href_link to link via SSL - which you should do when linking to any page that requires the user to be logged in. Example:

What this will do is link the SSL page iny our site (https://) rather than the normal http page. Assuming you have SSL set up of course!

Hope this helps.