Who’s Online and the Administrator Log
March 30th, 2007 by Harald Ponce de LeonPosted in osCommerce
We’re looking at releasing osCommerce 3.0 Alpha 4 tonight (Friday 30th March CEST). Although the roadmap entries for this release were finalized a while ago, some standard updates were performed on the framework to get both the Administration Tool and Catalog sides on par with each other. This left our Lebkuchen somewhat longer in the oven than planned but man does it taste and look real good now 
One of the last pieces of work that was developed for this release was the migration of the Administration Tool language definitions to the new ini style format that was introduced for the installation routine. This was done in preparation for the HTML E-Mails roadmap entry for 3.0 Alpha 5 where e-mails can be sent out in the language the customer has selected. By moving to the ini style format for the language definitions, it allows us to overwrite definitions with another language set at run-time which was not previously possible with the use of PHP constants.
Getting this work in now for the 3.0 Alpha 4 release gives it a greater audience for aggressive testing rather than leaving it for the 3.0 Alpha 5 release.
The 3.0 Alpha 4 release is also a great starting point for developers to start getting familiar with in regards to creating add-ons for it. Although there are still framework changes planned that will make the add-ons incompatible with the final 3.0 release, we hope to receive a lot of feedback from developers with how their experience with the release went, and how to further improve the framework to make it even easier to integrate add-ons for the final 3.0 release.
To kill time in waiting for the release to occur here are two movies demonstrating the Who’s Online page with the MaxMind GeoIP Country Lite module activated, and a second movie demonstrating the new Administrator Log section, customer address book administration page, and batch job capabilities.
Thanks to the MaxMind GeoIP Country Lite module, it is now possible to see the country flag as icons beside each customer entry, as well as additional information to the IP address which is GeoIP module dependent.
It’s also now possible to delete active customer sessions via the Who’s Online page. Although such functionality is available, it must obviously be used with extreme care.
The visual representation of customers is also improved by showing gender specific icons next to each customer and address book entry. This makes it easier to address the customer correctly when contacting them directly.
The introduction of the Administrator Log feature shows what database modifications were performed by which administrator. The logging information helps when a mistake was made and can be backtraced to who made the change and when. Administrators that have access to this section only see the entries to the sections they themselves have access to, and can be filtered together with a specific administrator.
The different coloured backgrounds for the Administrator Log entries mean the following:
- Green: inserted database field
- Orange: modified database field
- Red: deleted database field
The introduction of the Batch Job Capabilities feature brings in new checkboxes to the table listings on each Administration Tool section where actions can be performed on many entries at once. Newer actions such as exporting will be introduced in the next alpha development releases.
