3 steps to installing a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor for product descriptions in osCommerce.
Step 1. Go to ckeditor.com and download the latest Editor Release (CK Editor, which has superseded FCK Editor)…
Step 2. Unzip it all, then upload the fckeditor folder and all it’s contents to your admin directory.
Step 3.
2.2 and older: Amend admin/categories.php
2.3 and newer: Amend admin/includes/template_top.php
Find this:
< script language="javascript" src="includes/general.js" >< /script >
Add after it:
< script src="ckeditor/ckeditor.js" >< /script >
Amend admin/categories.php
Find this:
tep_draw_textarea_field(‘products_description[‘ . $languages[$i][‘id’] . ‘]’, ‘soft’, ’70’, ’15’, (isset($products_description[$languages[$i][‘id’]]) ? stripslashes($products_description[$languages[$i][‘id’]]) : tep_get_products_description($pInfo->products_id, $languages[$i][‘id’])));
Change it to this:
tep_draw_textarea_field(‘products_description[‘ . $languages[$i][‘id’] . ‘]’, ‘soft’, ’70’, ’15’, (isset($products_description[$languages[$i][‘id’]]) ? stripslashes($products_description[$languages[$i][‘id’]]) : tep_get_products_description($pInfo->products_id, $languages[$i][‘id’])),’ class=”ckeditor”‘);
Upload it and refresh the category (prodcut adding/editing) page. You should see the newly installed Editor looking like this:
Easy as 123…now go and use underlines, bold, colours to make your product descriptions really stand out 😉
Excellent tip, got mine loaded in 10mins. Watch out for this line: fckeditor/ckeditor/ckeditor.js. If you uploaded directly into your admin page, you don’t need the fckediter/
Finally got around to using this. I changed the information manager pages to use the new editor, too. So far so good.
Still no luck
Anyway, there is only the path to change :
“fckeditor/ckeditor/ckeditor.js” to “ckeditor/ckeditor.js”
Thanks Feydaylyn.
I tried with the oscommerce 2.3.1. I can not get it work.
Can someone help on this?
Hi,
one Question, if i allready have some Products, with the simple Oscommerce Textfield.
Do i lose them if change to the WYSIWYG?
Thanks for the Feedback 🙂
Greetings
Installation of fck does not change existing database entries for products, so you should not lose anything. Make a database backup prior to install if you are worried about it.
I have installed this and it works like a charm 🙂 Thanks Gary for this post.
Just wanted to say that in oscommerce version 2.3, the first change needs to be made in admin>includes>template_top.php, and the second in admin>categories.php.
I had FCK on my 2.2 until I got hacked, it went out with the hacked files (especially seeing the images directory of FCK was used by the hackers to hide their files) but aside form that I found that the html it came up with wasn’t consistent – OK it looked alright on the page, but it would do things like break up a sentence – a period would have it’s own html code all to itself, sometimes your heading would get a heading tag other times it would have a font size. But the biggest problem I got with it was it’s loading speed – I had 20 languages at the time and each language loaded a FCK editor which took for ever and if I got a slow connection (about 75% of the time) osC admin would time out due to “lack of activity” before I could get anything done.
FCK, or CK now, is useful in a situation where someone has paid for, and is paying for the upkeep of an ecommerce site where they know nothing about coding and just want to get their products on line and looking good… but if you have installed your own store plus 2 or 3, maybe more, contributions, you should be capable of writing your own html scripted product pages and maybe doing it in the time that FCK loads
Juls – I’m pretty sure that 20 languages is 17 too many for most osCommerce shops 😉 Having said that, I can see your concerns.
99% of the shopowners that I work for, have no clue about HTML and don’t want to learn how to embolden a piece of text. I don’t want to be updating their shops all the time as I would rather do more interesting stuff…so ckeditor is a good solution.
Isa – nice work on getting it into your 231 🙂
“Juls – I’m pretty sure that 20 languages is 17 too many for most osCommerce shops 😉 Having said that, I can see your concerns.”
Just one of the problems with a world wide enterprise 😀
As I said OK for those that don’t or don’t want to know html
Jules, 20 languages? wow, and I thought I had many. I can see why you had loading speed problems though. Personally I can code a simple piece of text but…I am lazy…lol it already takes me a lot of time writing up my texts in 4 languages (which I translate myself), so if I can avoid having to code them on top of that, I save a lot of time. Having said so, I do check what kind of code the editor has written…lazy but not gullible…;)
For those with loads of languages, I suspect the main emphasis is on the default language with the other languages being “helpful”…so how about having the ckeditor only on the default language?
http://pastebin.com/V380wm3L
Well I am a noob to this but I’m learning.My biggest question is,if I already have a website setup and I want to incorporate a shopping cart do I need to redo my site inside the shopping cart?Is it possible to just have links to add to the cart ?Then the cart can do its thing with the rest of the work?I like the way the site looks I dont relish the idea of having to redo everything again.
I came across this looking for a wysiwyg editor for oscommerce,but this question keeps running through my mind of having to redo my site.
Kent – you would need to rework your site as a part of oscommerce. It would not be difficult at all to get your site theme into osCommerce – for a good developer, certainly not more than 1 day of work.
Shawn – I have not tried this on 2.3.1, but instructions should be exactly the same.
Great write-up Gary.
Thanks for sharing.
I installed it on 2.3.1 with the help of the tips from @Robin and @Isa above.
Works like a charm.
Probably the best editor and the easiest installation I have come accros yet 🙂
COULD we send our admin/categories.php to you?we can’t change it.
To my email, be aware I will charge a beer fee.