Php Works osCommerce Blog

Good News. Php Works will become a full-time operation from the 4th June. This will mean that as well as having much more time to devote to doing quality work for my customers, I should also have more time to devote to this blog, with lots more hints, tips and tricks of the trade coming your way.

This site is also going to get a major makeover (design is almost off the drawing board), and will be updated to reflect the changing nature of the capabilities I offer. Although I still major on osCommerce, I also offer off-the-shelf content management and property management applications...more on this is due course.

Domain hijacking is not something I had really come across directly until the last few days, although it seems a not altogether uncommon problem.

The case I got involved with goes something like this… Business owner gets a (non-professional) “developer”, who happens to be a relative of a friend to setup a website/shopping cart for him. The task includes purchasing a new domain for the site.

The website was duly setup and operated for some time by the Business Owner. Recently, the “developer” has decided to copy the business owner’s operation and set up in business himself selling the same products. As he had access to the product distribution contacts, client lists, product images, etc, this was relatively easy to do.

The real crunch came when we found that the domain purchased, under which the business owner had been trading for a considerable period of time, was in fact registered under the developer’s name, and was completely under his control. This led to the developer being able to redirect the domain to a site of his choosing, effectively killing the business owner’s trade overnight.

Now, this situation isn’t completely irrecoverable, but it’s certainly not a situation you would want to put yourself in if you can avoid it. Imagine if the daily traffic you receive to your site, which is directly attributed to referrals and searches based on your domain name were removed at a stroke – certainly it would take a good deal of time to recover from this situation.

The lesson here is that you need to be careful to use reputable agents when buying new domain names. This is especially true if you are leaving it to them to enter all the registration details and to look after configuration of things on your behalf (perhaps because you don’t feel confident enough to do it, or don’t have the time).

Is it just me, or has CRE Loaded gone completely to pieces lately? CRE Loaded is something that I've been using to build e-commerce solutions for people for a number of years, but in the last few months, it's given me so many headaches it's unbelievable.

I'm all for patching software when it's necessary, for instance when new security vulnerabilities are discovered, etc. But just lately the CRE Loaded team seem to have gone into overdrive, releasing patch upon patch, each one fixing bugs in the previous release, but breaking new things left right and center. Could it be that in the rush to be seen as constantly improving and breaking new ground, the development team is pushing just anything out the door without sufficient acceptance testing?

For the most part, the simple stuff in CRE Loaded seems to work unhindered, but as soon as you start using some of extra features, such as Gift Vouchers, PayPal IPN and Option Type Feature, you find that the contributions have been installed without fully taking account of each other. In my view, the instability of this particular osCommerce fork has now got to the point where you seriously have to ask yourself whether you really need all the functions this swiss army knife of a shopping cart offers (and the related grief of fixing all the bugs in the bits you want to use) or if it is quicker and less painful to start with an off the shelf osCommerce MS2 build and then install the specific contributions you actually need. I know that from now on the latter will be getting my vote every time!

Wow, it's been a long time since I posted anything in this blog. This is a clear indication of how busy I've been recently helped other people to resolve their online trading issues, and also moving house, which has kept me busy away from my computer for a while too.

OK then, looking at the hits from search engine results on this blog, I get some new ideas for customisation tips and tricks. Here's the first one - how to add a search box to the header of your site (or anywhere else for that matter).

This is actually quite a simple thing to pull off - simply we need a text box for the search criteria, a button to launch the search, and to point the action of the thing at the right script file.

So, having located the place in the code where you want to place the search box (in header.php for instance, if you want it in the header), put in the following code:

<form action="advanced_search_result.php" method="GET">
<input type="text" name="keywords">
<input type="submit" value="Search!">
</form>

This should now do the job, but probably won't look very pretty. You can add some styling to this new element more easily if you first enclose it in a div element:

<div id="search_box">
<form action="advanced_search_result.php" method="GET">
<input type="text" name="keywords">
<input type="submit" value="Search!">
</form>
</div>

Now, let's get busy with some styling. Add the following to your stylesheet.css:

#search_box {
}

#search_box input {
}

These will affect the styling of the enclosing div and the inputs (text box and submit button) respectively. So you could so something like:

#search_box {
background: #ccc;
border: 1px solid #000;
}

#search_box input {
border: 2px solid #aaa;
}

to put lines around your box/button and have the whole thing put inside a coloured/bordered box.

Clearly, there's a lot more you can do with this, including using an image instead of a button, or colouring the button itself separately from the text input box, but I'm intending to cover CSS styling in depth in this article.

To see such a search box in action, have a look at a CRE Loaded site I put together recently: http://www.sriremotetoys.co.uk/ (not yet live at the time of writing). You should also be able to get at the stylesheet for this project, but for the lazy amongst you, here are the relevant bits:

#header_search {
margin-top: 15px;
text-align: right;
padding-right: 20px;
font-family: tahoma, verdana, arial;
font-size: 12px;
color: #21EEFA;
font-weight: bold;
}

#header_search input {
border: 1px solid #21EEFA;
}

In this case, most of the CSS effort was focussed on getting the search box to appear in the right place within the header area.

We are now able to take new registrations for our osCommerce hosting service.

Our shared hosting packages are based on high quality UK servers, based at the brand new BlueSquare Data Centre located close to Heathrow Airport in the Thames 'silicon' Valley. This allows us to offer low latency, high availability shared hosting that has been specifically configured to allow osCommerce, and the majority of osCommerce contributions, to be operated trouble-free.

All our packages include the world-leading hosting control panel, cPanel, which provides a huge range of controls through which you can manage your e-mails, webstats, subdomains, and much, much more.

What's more, you have support of a hosting provider who knows osCommerce inside-out and can assist you with any problems you might experience with operating your osCommerce store.

Right now, we will carry out installation of any build of osCommerce you require on your hosting for free and if you are looking to migrate your existing osCommerce store to our hosting then we can also carry this out for without charge.

Hosting packages start at just £10 a month - find out more at our hosting signup page.