Over the past couple of days, I’ve taken the basic RC3 that’s available on github and added some contributions and other code to it. So far, so good.
My own code (in other words, avoiding pre-made contributions);
1. Coupons v6 – blogged about a couple of days ago. Found 1 small incompatibility, but this was soon fixed.
2. Banned Customers – enable the Store Owner to easily ban customers. No bugs.
3. Featured Products – Store Owner can select products to feature in a new feastured product for month box in the category and front page.
4. Four extra product images – extra images are always good. I linked this to jQuery Fancybox. Bug found as RC3 uses incorrect doctype. Fixed easily by using correct Doctype! HPDL aware.
I then added some pre-made contributions;
A. FWR Medias KissMT Header Tags. Adds meta tags and a few other meta bits and pieces. RC3 comes with it’s own solution to this, but KissMT is better. Easy install, no bugs. I particularly wanted to avoid Jack_MC’s Header Tags SEO as it is not as nicely coded as KissMT.
B. osCThumb. Makes thumbnail images using GD library. No bugs.
I will next be adding some of the security stuff that is found in the osCommerce forum and Contributions.
Anyone else have ideas for MUST HAVE contributions to roll into this? Also, if you want to keep a closer eye on my progress, hit me up on twitter @osc_pro
I *do* wish they could break out a new release number instead of calling this v2.2 rc3. Would going to v2.3 be just too difficult? We have been on v2.2 for how many years now?
Do you have any need to add any of these?
– URL modifiers (like Ultimate SEO URLs)
– Payment or shipping modules
– checkout simplifications
Have you seen any need to _remove_ any of the stock code? I’m thinking of things like:
– banners
– counters
– some infoboxes
Scott – it’s entirely possible that it might be called something completely different. I’m just calling it RC3 to show that it’s not the latest publically released version (RC2a) that I am talking about.
Jared – I added FWR’s USU 5 – no bugs. No changes to shipping and payment. Will definitely be looking at the checkout. I removed some HTML already. I’m tempted to do away with the following; tell-friend, reviews. Not just the boxes, but the whole functionality. Thoughts anyone?
I have always had switches in my clean copy of osC that allows you to turn off banners, counters and who’s online via the admin. They are not needed in most stores and it saves a ton of DB calls.
Tell A Friend could be removed but I think a lot of store owners keep the reviews … but I also think that their customers don’t use it so I have always been torn between keeping it or taking it out.
IMO, tell a friend looks somewhat amateurish and reviews is a business risk unless one adds moderation to the reviews. auto-posting them is an invitation for people to advertise their own less-than-wholesome sites on by “reviewing” your products.
I’ll be very interested to see how much more change there is between what’s on github now and when the next milestone release is actually released. That may affect the future relevance of the work you’re doing now.
J – Whats on git now, is probably not going to change too much to what will be released (at least for rc3). I don’t think it can really.
I started my own github repo => http://github.com/gburton/oscommerce2/ (bare bones right now, all I’ve done is added IP address collection and corrected the Doctype). More changes to follow.
I was looking at your Github and noticed that you took out the images on the pages such as conditions when converting it to CSS. I agree with you removing them BUT for an official osC release I do not think that you should change the layout and look of the store.
Why not have instead of (conditions.php):
< h1 >< / h1 >
Have:
< span class="heading_left" >< h1 >< / h1 >< / span >
< span class="heading_right" >< / span >
I am sure you can create the classes. 🙂
Hi Peter – can see what you mean.
But the point of Github to fork and do what you will with the codebase. Then any of the other forks with the github can pull your changes over easily.
Thus, my fork is not an official release from oscommerce/HPDL…
Anyone reading – please note that worpdpress doesn’t appear to like html in comments, so the html above looks weird as I put spaces in the html bits to make it appear (sort of OK). Hmmm.
Anyway; how about this (assuming I did want to retain those awful images;
< h1 >< ?php echo HEADING_TITLE; ?>< ?php echo tep_image(DIR_WS_IMAGES . 'table_background_specials.gif', HEADING_TITLE, HEADING_IMAGE_WIDTH, HEADING_IMAGE_HEIGHT); ?>< / h1 >
and
h1 .img { float: right; }
Completely untested, but in theory…
Gary,
Do you plan on putting your version (with these changes you’ve been telling us about) up on github?
J – not at first.
My main aim for now is to get my github version to xhtml 1 strict. Then add jquery whereever I can to replace some functionality in the catalog side. I’m pretty sure that if I can find some help to get this done, it could be used as a basis for shops for at least a few more years.
After the basic framework is there, then I want to start exploring the possibility of a commercially based open source cart. That’s not everyone’s cup of tea, I understand that, however I know there are a number of people out there who want commercial support for their online activities – and are willing to pay commercial rates.