Has anyone ever thought about renaming osCommerce page filenames and directory names and other things? This may be a decent way to solve some problems that osCommerce shop owners experience.

For many years, my own osCommerce store has had a different name for the product_info.php page, which has lead to greater SEO benefits. But that's another reason…

For this post I am more interested in making osCommerce harder for a "hacker" to hack. For starters, read a previous post on this blog for an overview on some ideas and methods. Here's some more ideas hunt google or the osCommerce forum if you need code examples on how to do any of this);

1. Why advertise that your site is osCommerce?
Of course, to the experienced eye, it is easy to tell whether a site is running osC or not. But why advertise the fact.

Is your site saying "powered by oscommerce" on it? Remove it!

Is your site using the oscsid variable? OSCsid – a small change, but well worth it? Why not change that to the zencart sid? Or creloaded? Or one of your own. It doesn't really matter what you use for an SID – and it is easy to change in osCommerce…

2. Change the filenames!
Why would you keep the filenames the same as standard osCommerce? Of course, you'll probably need to keep index.php the same in order for your site to show up when your URL in input, but even this is easily changable! As for the rest, it's very simple. Rename the file, rename it's corresponding language file, make the same change in the file at includes/filenames.php

3. Change the dirnames!
Change the Directory names! Why keep the name "includes" – it could as easily be "inc" or "incl" or "zippy" or "brian". Just rename it and make the corresponding change in BOTH configure.php files.

I hear you saying, "that's all well and good Gary, but what about contributions, won't this break them"? The answer to this is maybe it will, if the contribution is not correctly written. The same goes for templates – if they are correctly written, they will still work.

Note that I am not saying that changing names of things is a great protection against anything, but if you make your website harder for a layman to know what software is running it, you MAY find they move onto the next website quicker, leaving your site alone.