I went to the dollar store today and found shelves of missed marked back to school items containing the below price tag:
(1 FOR $0.00)
I have never seen so many products at one time incorrectly marked at $0.00! This is an excellent reminder to all osCommerce store owners to check their prices to make sure that none of their products are incorrectly priced.
To be on the safe side I suggest adding “ANY $0 PRICED ITEMS ARE NEW ITEMS AND ARE CURRENTLY BEING PRICED AND ARE TEMPORARILY NOT FOR SALE” to the conditions of use page.
While reviewing multiple live shop submissions, I have noticed several things:
When writing a description write about something unique about your site that makes your store stand out from the rest of the stores in the category. I see too many one sentence descriptions that have little to no thought put into them. A better description will also help us determine the correct category to place your site under.
Please make sure that your site has all required information filled out (Shipping and Returns, Privacy Notice, Terms and Conditions). Also make sure that the links to these pages are easy to find.
I have also noticed several broken links as well as sites that do not even use osCommerce.
Following these guidelines should assure that your site will be approved for the live shops directory much faster.
I haven’t yet found a suitable “diff” application for the Mac that is as good as Beyond Compare for Windows. Under Linux it isn’t a problem as Beyond Compare can run fine under a Wine environment, which is unfortunately not available on the PPC platform.
As the unix “diff” program is commonly available, I followed up its manpage to see what parameters were available to adequately report a listing of different files within two separate directories. The following command meets my demands appropriately:
diff -rq --ignore-matching-lines=$Id: --exclude=.svn --exclude=.DS_Store dir1 dir2
This recursively scans dir1 and dir2 to list different files, while ignoring “$Id:” strings within files and “.svn” directories. Any (Mac specific) “.DS_Store” directories are also excluded from the listing.
I created an alias for this to save retyping the whole command each time I need it:
alias oscdiff='diff -rq --ignore-matching-lines=$Id: --exclude=.svn --exclude=.DS_Store $1 $2'
I can then use that as simple as:
oscdiff dir1 dir2
This helps me when I work on my own development branch and when it is time to commit to /trunk/, can make sure that all changes have been merged over.
I have recently noticed some general trends when reviewing OsCommerce sites. Many OsCommerce shop owners forget to do the following:
Change the rollover color of their links to match their stores color scheme.
This can be done here: catalog/stylesheet.css
Change the buttons to match the design/color scheme of their store.
This can be done here: catalog/includes/languages/[Your Language]/images/buttons
Change the icons to reflect their store design.
Right click on the image you wish to replace. Most of them are named table_background_default.gif or something along those lines. Once you get the properties, look at the path and then upload your new image in its place.
I just experienced another nasty PHP4 / PHP5 compatibility issue that plagued the logging features of the support site administration tool (which is planned to be introduced in the 3.0 Alpha 4 release).
The implementation uses the strrpos() function to grab the end of a string from a string searched starting point. The opposite function is strpos() that searches from the start of the string instead from the end.
The string to search for, the needle, can be a character or a string for the normal strpos() function in both PHP 4 and PHP 5.
There is however a difference with the strrpos() function where PHP 4 accepts the needle as a character only, and can first be a string from PHP 5 onwards.
This took some time to debug where my local server is running on PHP 5 with the logging features working fine, and the support site running PHP 4 where the issue was first evident.
There is a warning about this on the documentation page which I overlooked during the implementation phase. Such incompatibility warnings should be marked with the infamous <blink> tag so they stand out better 
The positive side to this is the valuable user comments on the php documentation pages where numerous functions are provided to workaround the problem.
Workaround functions are obviously not elegant solutions to use, and will look at improving the logic further for the 3.0 Alpha 4 release.