The live shops can now be filtered by the country. This filters each main category and empty categories are not shown.
http://shops.oscommerce.com/

This is very nice to be filtered by countries!

Enjoy!

I have been pretty busy as of the first of this new year but hope to do some more work on the docs soon.

Everyone take care and spring will be here soon!

What a joyous season of the year! It even snowed here a little. My dog Maggie was outside using her nose as a shovel for the snow so that was funny … she was running around with the snow on her nose.

The docs are slowly being moved to this wiki and still in progress although this will slow down during the holidays.

Take care if you are driving or flying to family and enjoy the season!

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving weekend! I cooked a chicken instead of a turkey this year and had my special dressing and homemade cranberries … wow am I full! I get a brand of chicken that does not have chemicals in it and is only around in certain areas. The brand is called “Smart Chicken” … that chicken wasn’t too smart if he ended up on the table!!! LOL

Anyway, I have started moving the doc information from the knowledgebase to the new wiki confluence site and cleaning it up. The new wiki is really nice because you can type in the “Rich Text” box area and the code is automatically extrapolated into the wiki box. Also the wiki editing is much easier than other wiki sites I have seen. As I understand it the new wiki site will send pdf files of the text so this is a plus.

I really thank Harald a lot for making this so nice and easy for all of us! Thank you Harald!

I look forward to getting the docs ready for ms3 and ask the community to send me ideas or changes to look into.

We all need to work together!

We now have a navigation system in place for the live shops!

The link is under the “Network” section.

http://shops.oscommerce.com/

Each sponsor and new site added has their own section plus the main categories are broken down again for easier searching.

Have fun and enjoy!

We are keeping caught on the Live Site Submissions … thank you Wendy!

However, we are finding that there are several duplicate submissions and some are not following the Live Shop rules here:
http://www.oscommerce.info/kb/280

All sites that do not follow these guidelines are deleted.

All sites that put in duplicate submissions are deleted … we have a checker in place so it really does not help you to make multiple submissions.

Soon we will have a category navigation for the Live Shops and your site will be in the most appropriate one!

On some earlier site submissions I found a few sites that I thought were really nice to share.

1. Eden Bridals
This site is very clean and elegant and has lots of graphic work. The only thing I would change on this site is the Result Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 … [Next >>] navigation links in the stylesheet to be more in line with the colors of the site … a nice burgundy color would be good!

2. Rawlings Leather Goods
I especially like the way a graphic is to the left of each category listing when you click on that category and love the colors!

3. At Wix End
You can navigate from category to category using the little arrow buttons on the same line as the name of the category … good job and nice, soothing colors!

We look forward to community input!

Sincerely,
Melinda

All of the live shops are now listed in the “Live Shops” section here:
http://www.oscommerce.com/shops/live

If your site was submitted but is not found in the live shops then it was removed for not following the guidelines which are here:
http://www.oscommerce.info/kb/The_osCommerce_Project/280

These guidelines are also listed as a link to the knowledgebase article when you are submitting your site to the live shops.
http://www.oscommerce.com/shops/live/new,shop

I want to thank the live shops team for all their hard work!

In the coming weeks the docs team will be going over the knowledgebase and updating as much as we can for the ms3 store version.

Thanks everyone and have a great weekend!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and New Years!

The live shops are moving right along and will all be activated soon.

We will be going through the ms3 installation and making some changes in the documentation.

Hope to have more later!

The live shop entries to be added are waiting on the live shop team members, Wendy and Scott, to finish reorganizing their assigned category structures. Then, each team member will have approximately 45 pages of sites to input into the live shops section to finish. Personally I have finished my category reorganization and am about finished with my site inputs! Yeah!

The goal is to finish inputting the sites into the live shops section by November 30, 2005. The sites that have not been categorized cannot be put into the live shops until the category reorganizing is finished by the other team members so waiting … waiting … waiting … waiting …

There are some additional comments in the ms2.2 documentation download so if you need a fresh copy be sure and download it!

Thanks!

Knowledgebase Developments:

A new kb article has been written about incorporating php with mouseover graphics to hold the session id…enjoy!
Add Mouse Over Graphic Links with Session ID

There are some touchups to the article “Add php Links to Graphics with Session ID” on that same page.

Live Shops Developments:

Work is continuing on revamping the live shop listings putting them into categories/subcategories according to the site’s main description or the majority of products in one category on each site.

When a site is submitted to be a live shop the description should incorporate the “main” item that is sold. This really helps us to categorize each site and put in the appropriate category/subcategory.

The site categories are being broken down to 3 levels so in the future someone will be able to search for a site in the “live shops” section of osCommerce. This will really be nice to specifically go to a category/subcategory and find sites of that listing in the future.

As always we appreciate the osCommerce community!