osCommerce Blog

It’s just about the end of January and time for my site of the month pick. After searching far and wide I decided to choose Knot Just Baskets.
Knot Just Baskets has a simple and effective design. They sell gift baskets and gifts for various occasions. I found there unique osCommerce site contained an effective navigation scheme.

In response to replies to my previous site of the month posting I have proposed a new idea to the osCommerce team. I suggested the integration of a poll module to the current blog system set up on the osCommerce site. That way I will be able to select 2 or more site’s for consideration for my “site of the month” title. By adding a poll osCommerce visitors and site users worldwide will be able to provide feedback. My “site of the month” title will be given to the site that receives the highest amount of votes by the end of the month. I would love to hear your feedback on this idea. Feel free to post a response to this blog.

Hi all, 

I hope everyone is not stressing out for the Holiday season!
I have decided to start Andrew’s osCommerce site of the month. Each month I will post my favorite osCommerce store based on all the live shops entries reviewed by me. It will be based on design and usability.

My favorite site for DECEMBER is:
The Rocking Horse
On line baby boutique & stylish gifts.

I really like the site’s overall layout. They did an excellent job with the design and navigation buttons. The osCommerce portion is nicely integrated into the rest of the website.

Just want to say Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!

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!

Hi Everyone!

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!

Hi everyone, I hope everybody had a good Thanksgiving. I just got back from shopping after attempting to buy several tech items. One of which was a 250 gig external hard drive. After getting to the stores at around 8 am I had no luck Lines were long and stores did not have enough of the advertised items. How many people believe in shopping on Black Friday? Is it worth it anymore or is it just better to shop online? Do you offer Black Friday specials on your osCommerce store? I am beginning to think it’s better to just stay at home especially with my experience today, not being able to get anything that was advertised. And after you get what’s advertised you have to spend time filling out rebates!

More info on Black Friday

PHP 5.2.0 was recently released which “includes a large number of new features, bug fixes and security enhancements” to the PHP 5.x series. The PHP Group also published an upgrade guide for existing PHP 5 users that documents the (incompatibility) changes the new release brings.

osCommerce 2.2 Milestone 2 Update 060817 works fine with PHP 5.2.0 (with register_globals and register_long_arrays enabled).

There is however one change that 5.2.0 brings in that causes osCommerce 3.0 Alpha 3 to produce a PHP FATAL error in the sessions implementation, specifically when the session data is stored in the database (by default for osCommerce 3.0).

This is due to a change in session_set_save_handler() where the “write” and “close” handlers are called after objects have been destructed.

As the sessions implementation in osCommerce 3.0 is done in a class/object, writing session data and closing the session are no longer possible as the registered object would be destructed and no longer exist to perform those duties.

The proper solution here is to use session_write_close() in the destructor of the osC_Session class:

class osC_Session {
  ...
 
  function __destruct() {
    session_write_close();
  }
}

As __destruct() is a PHP 5 feature only, an alternative solution is needed for PHP 4 compatibility (the minimum requirement for osCommerce 3.0 will be PHP 4.1), and that is to register session_write_close() as a shutdown function:

session_set_save_handler(array(&$this, '_open'),
                         array(&$this, '_close'),
                         array(&$this, '_read'),
                         array(&$this, '_write'),
                         array(&$this, '_destroy'),
                         array(&$this, '_gc'));
 
register_shutdown_function('session_write_close');

This has already been reported at our new Issue Tracker and has been fixed at r1107.

The Commit Policy for developers has been updated to describe the process of referencing tickets on Jira when the changes involved solve that ticket.

http://svn.oscommerce.com/confluence/x/JQ

When viewing a ticket on Jira, the referenced commit changes will be automatically shown under the “Fisheye” tab where the comments are shown.

The Repository Browser (Fisheye) also automatically links to the tickets when referenced in the commit log.

The Trac solution on the Development Site that was responsible for the wiki, tickets, and repository browser has been replaced due to the persistent problems it had on the server. The Development Site is now running on 3 new “enterprise-class” solutions that provide more features and flexibility in fostering the developer community.

The solutions now taking care of the wiki, tickets, and repository browser are:

• Confluence (Wiki)
• Jira (Tickets)
• Fisheye (Repository Browser)

Each can be easily reached at:

http://svn.oscommerce.com

The contents of the previous Trac installation have been migrated over to the new wiki and ticket sites. Please note that the accounts created previously for Trac are no longer used, and that a new account has to be created on Jira if tickets are to be submitted or tracked. Please also be sure to replace your Trac RSS subscription feeds to the new feeds each solution provides.

A hardware upgrade of more memory is also pending due to the extra resources the solutions place on the server. These are Java based solutions running on 2 Tomcat application servers; one for Confluence and Jira, and one for Fisheye (which currently requires its own application server), and are being served by the Apache webserver.

The Apache webserver has been tuned due to it basically acting as a proxy server. It was infact about to be replaced by lighttpd but realized that Apache is still needed due to the subversion repository. I am personally still interested in seeing what benefits lighttpd can bring in this setup and will look into it again in the coming weeks.

With the new Wiki site now live and running we are also contemplating moving the content from the Knowledge Base site over to it. Due to the content on the Knowledge Base site being based on current development versions, moving it over to the Development Site will make it a perfect fit where all development related work can be found on the one site. This would then leave the oscommerce.info domain serving static documentation that is produced by the Wiki site for the stable releases.

A change to the Tickets site has also been performed where it will be possible to submit tickets regarding language definitions and developer branches. This has been started on the languages with the developers that have already created user accounts on Jira, and will include the other developers as soon as their accounts have been created. The benefit here is submitting a ticket in a specific category will automatically assign it to the developer working on the job.

The Repository Browser (Fisheye) is also a radical change compared to Trac and will take a few mouse clicks understanding how it works.

It’s fun looking at graphical representations of the amount of lines in the codebase with Fisheye. Additional statistical information regarding the development repository can be found at Ohloh:

http://next.ohloh.net/projects/3341

It’s currently only measuring /trunk/oscommerce and will look at updating it to /trunk/ to also include the languages being worked on.

Overall I’m very impressed with the new Development Site and therefore thank Atlassian (Jira, Confluence) and Cenqua (Fisheye) for making it possible by supplying free licenses to the solutions for Open Source projects

Other changes in our network infrastructure have also occurred the past week where the database server for the Community Support Forums was upgraded. A new faster dedicated server is also being currently prepared to move the German Community Support Forums over to from its current dedicated server. The total number of servers running the osCommerce Network of Support Sites is 5 dedicated servers, in addition Sunsite.dk and SourceForge who mirror the downloads for project releases and contribution files.

Some interesting facts I hope

So I was at a restaurant yesterday and we ordered a dish with vegetables. As soon as it comes out and I begin to dig in and guess what I see in it? It was a green caterpillar! With all the news in the US about e-coli and raw spinach and this recent incident that I had, I suggest paying careful attention and make sure you wash your vegetables prior to cooking or eating it. Have you ever found something really weird in your dish at a restaurant? This was defiantly a first for me!

On a side note, I finished the final stages of a project I have been working on. As a webmaster looking for link exchange have you ever wondered if a site is a reliable reciprocal or paid link partner? I have created an organization QLEW (Quality Link Exchange Websites) which allows webmasters to leave comments on websites that offer reciprocal or paid link exchange. Membership is free but all QLEW members must abide by a strict code of ethics. If you have an osCommerce store that has a link directory please check out becomeing a member of Find quality link exchange websites.

Well I was surprised to see the PR (Page Rank) increase on one of the stores I have been working on Nita Creations. The PR went up from a 3 to a 4. It looks like Google has preformed a PR update. On the subject of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), An osCommerce store owner recently asked me the following question “How do I get my store listed on Google?” This in my opinion is a very common question that new store owners encounter after setting up there osCommerce site. So what are some basic steps that can be taken to increase the chance of Google indexing your website?

Here is a basic list of things to do.

- First, find a niche for your site and select a group of keywords.
(proper keyword selection is essential and cannot be stressed enough)
- Next, find link partners to backlink to your website.
(links back to your website from high PR pages RELATED to your site are especially useful.)

Now on to optimizing your osCommerce store.

- Make sure your title tag as well as alt tags contain your selected keywords.
- Make sure you have a sitemap that will help Google and other search engines spider your page.
- Make sure to always have fresh content.
These are just the basics, I cannot guarantee your site will increase in popularity but following these basic steps will certainly point your site in the right direction.

What are some PR determining factors?

- Which website links to you?
- PR of the website linking to you.
- Anchor text used in the link linking to you.
- Whether or not the website linking to you are deemed by Google as authority websites.

Feel free to post a comment with suggestions that helped you increase page rank and the popularity of your website. I also recommend that you visit the Next Steps/ Marketing forum here: http://forums.oscommerce.com/index.php?showforum=40