Help! Attributes, Templates, Stylesheet

Maureen asks;

I have a sign and apparel shop, we sell tshirts and would like to do some interactive designs online. I can’t seem to find a good contribution to make this change within osc.

OK, I’m guessing that you are trying to use the “products attributes” and you want to change the image of a product when a different attribute is selected? If so, take a look at; http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/5456 – I have not tested or even used that addon, but it looks OK to me.

Second I’m not sure how to even go about downloading and uploading a template when I do find one.

Once you find a template, you’ll need to follow the instructions. You need to note that applying a template should be done as the very first thing after an install otherwise any changes you make might knock the template off base…

Hopefully the template provider has just provided changed files rather than a whole oscommerce install! If you can, avoid the “osCommerce Templates” from the likes of Template Monster – they are good looking, but poorly coded.

Third, yes there is a third, I read about changing colors for the shop but can only seem to change the background color. I’ve been reading for weeks about ‘how to change colors’ and it doesn’t seem to work for whatever reason. One day I can change lets say the background but nothing else will change. Even when I go through every option there is.

Everything that you’ll need to change would be in the stylesheet.css file – but as osCommerce was coded so long ago (the year 2000) the files and stylesheet are kind of outdated. So you have lots of redundant code in them.

The easiest way is to open up an osCommerce page, then do “view source”. Find the area that you wish to change the look of and then work your way backwards to find the “class” that is applied to it.

As an example, let’s say you wanted to change the footer area where it says “158 requests since Monday 07 April, 2008”, I’d open up the source and find it;

[php]

158 requests since Monday 07 April, 2008

[/php]

You can see that the nearest “class” before it is `footer`, so then you find this in the stylesheet.css file and change it. Hope this makes sense?

I’d also advise you to have a think about getting your hands on a tutorial – this will help you to really get up to speed with osCommerce really quickly. My own tutorial on “How To Design osCommerce” is a good read, well worth the small cost to save banging your head on the keyboard.

Gary