Actually, this is rather old news – it was released back in October 2010!
The site is an e-commerce site based on osCommerce, with a lot of add-ons and a certain amount of bespoke development, including postcode-based shipping calculations. The catalogue was initially seeded by taking on data from an ms-access database.
It’s currently hosted at www.cheapcablesonline.co.uk but may be relocated to a sub-directory of the main company site (www.clubtek.co.uk) at a later date.
Now, just to be clear, I can’t claim much credit for this. It’s a huge add-on developed by lots of people including Jan Zonjee.
All I’ve done is to apply all the specified changes to a 2.3.1 store instead of 2.2, do some testing and bug fixing, and upload the results. I’m also keeping a store online with it implemented (at least for now) and following the thread so I can support any 2.3.1-specific problems.
You can download it from osCommerce Add-ons and get help in the support forum.
There might be thousands of existing add-ons for osCommerce 2.2, and it’s even true that many of them work on 2.3.1, but sometimes there isn’t what you need and you have to get on and do it yourself… so I did.
Initially aimed at converting an already-installed store (eg. from cpanel / Fantastico etc), this add-on has been extended so that you can overwrite the downloaded osc install and then run it in one step.
It basically converts the installed store and sample data from being US-based to UK-based, including date format, currency, address format. It sets up a European tax zone, changes ‘state’ to ‘county’ and leaves this free-text.
If you might need it, you can get it at osCommerce addons and see what it looks like in my development store. If you’ve got questions about it, please use the support forum, unless you want to ask me for paid help in implementing it, in which case get in touch directly.
I now have an osCommerce 2.3.1 store set up, so if you want to see what it looks like, go to http://neo-lasers.co.uk/shop-23/ which hasn’t had any changes to the delivered template (at least, not so far) but has a couple of add-ons loaded that configure the appearance.
Just set up a couple of osCommerce installations, initially to investigate the different behaviours of the two add-ons PWA (Purchase without account) and Checkout Redux, which streamlines things but seems to have a bug or two. Checkout Redux is on shop one while the other store started with PWA and is now getting other stuff on top, towards a suggested initial package for most stores. The front page should carry a current list of add-ons here.
Just this week, I was asked quickly to implement a basic site for a last-minute candidate in the elections in a couple of weeks. She was able to give me text and images that had been prepared for a flyer, so it was possible to get the site up and running on the basic hosting in under a day’s work. The site is www.eolayokun.co.uk for Elizabeth Olayokun.
The full error message is:
PHP Warning: move_uploaded_file(name.JPG) [<a href='function.move-uploaded-file'>function.move-uploaded-file</a>]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in …oscdir…/admin/includes/classes/upload.php on line 84
Proved to be a kind of intermediate permissions error. Goes away like other permissions problems with 777 insecure settings. To give the web server write access on Hostroute, you need owner set to cpanel user, group set to nobody and write permissions to both. You have to get Hostroute support to set group nobody, as it’s not permitted from the account shell access even when that’s turned on.
This exact error was after group was set to nobody but it only had read access; change permissions in ftp program.
This relates to install instructions: http://svn.oscommerce.com/confluence/display/OSCDOC/Pre-Installation+Steps#Pre-InstallationSteps-FileandDirectoryPermissions
The full error message is:
PHP Warning: file_exists() [<a href='function.file-exists'>function.file-exists</a>]: open_basedir restriction in effect. File(/usr/bin/convert) is not within the allowed path(s): (…actual settings removed…) in …oscdir…/admin/includes/applications/products/actions/save.php on line 23
It turns out just to be a configuration error. Osc 3.0A5 defaults to Imagemagick for image processing with the path set to /usr/bin/convert. Delete this in program locations to make the error go away. See http://forums.oscommerce.com/topic/331275-imagemagick/page__p__1380028&#entry1380028
Time to move from notes on scrappy bits of paper to a medium that I can find again; useful hints and tips, problems and resolutions so that I can repeat installations and design solutions for other clients.
At some point, I may even configure WordPress, but the cobbler’s children are always the last to get new shoes.
