Product Lists in osCommerce

Some time ago on one of my other blogs, I spoke about my frustration with how osCommerce lists products. It’s a mish-mash of 4 or 5 different ways.

To see what I am talking about have a look at this (New Products for Month), then this (New Products Page), then this (Products of a certain Manufacturer) and finally this (Advanced Search Results).  You can see the difference in the looks straightaway.

My idea is to get a standardised look for all lists.  So what I am going to attempt to do is to use one module to create all the lists – in this way, we know that any lists of products will look the same where-ever you are in the store.

I’ve been working on this off and on for some while (admittedly more “off” than “on” but there you go), and have so far managed to get the following lists standardised:

1. new products for “month” (in the index page)
2. category drilldown lists
3. sub-category drilldown lists
4. manufacturer lists (needs further coding to add “paging”)
5. advanced_search_results list (however, this needs further coding to add “paging”)

I still need to recode products_new.php to use the module rather than it’s own mishmash of code.

More lists

I can think of the “shopping_cart.php” list (eg, when having 2 or more items in cart), but this would need to stay as is, as it needs extras such as “remove” column, “quantity” column etc.

What other lists are there in osCommerce – off the top of my head, I can’t think of any more.  Can you?

Seeing the results

Once I have all the lists covered, I’ll introduce the new module as a contribution – in my opinion it’ll be much more useful to have the look of the lists standardised across all osCommerce pages.