Joey asks;

I saw your admin contribution and went to your website. I am having an issue {&} if you can help that would be great.

I made a nice shop but I am new to php and can't figure out how to merge {PWA and STS}…THANKS!

Where do I start?

PWA (Purchase Without Account) is a totally un-necessary contribution that adds no value to the average osCommerce shop in any way, shape or form. What you need to do is think about how a customer perceives your site and move on from there. Within the official forum there is a very long thread started over 5 years ago by myself, which is ongoing - search for "Customer Login Routines". My suggestions is as follows;

1. Rename parts of the checkout procedure so that they are less "in your face". Eg, chenge "create account" to "your details".
2. When starting the checkout, start on "your details" NOT "login"
3. Remove the password input boxes from the "create account" page. Add a checkbox saying "remember my details" instead.
4. Create a random password for EVERY customer.
5. IF thy checked the "remember me" checkbox, then send an email with the password. If they did not, then don't send that email.
6. Sanitize the rest of the checkout procedure, by removing some of the unnecessary pages.

If I can find some time, I will make an optimised checkout that does exactly this.

Simple Template System - the ability to design an osCommerce store by amending one file, rather than 30 or 40. This is even more un-needed in the average osCommerce Store.

It's a pointless contribution that serves only to make your learning of PHP and osCommerce almost NIL. You say that you are new to PHP, and yet you want to use STS to design your site - meaning that you'll never get to experience the "joy" that working with core code brings to you. You can only learn by getting your hands dirty and you simply cannot do that with STS.

If you already have STS installed, you've already stumbled across another real problem that STS brings to you - it's harder to add contributions - and as only "newbies" and "lazy designers" use STS, it's almost impossible to find good help.

Also, it adds more layers of code to an already over-coded piece of software - it makes sites load slower - it's an all round mistake to use it.

Suggestion: Remove STS. Go back to standard osCommerce. Take the time out to learn at least some of the code within osCommerce. You'll then be able to add Contributions easily.

Did you realize that I don't like STS ? It's the WORST templating layer presently available.

In V3 of osCommerce will be included it's own templating engine, could be worth waiting for, but who knows when v3 will arrive?

For anyone reading this who wants to properly learn a bit about how to lay out an osCommerce site WITHOUT using some flaky templating system, you could do a lot worse than have a read of "Designing for osCommerce" available from www.oscbooks.com.