osCommerce Templates

When we first installed the auto thumbnailer contribution it worked fine, absolutely perfectly. However after installing the other contributions I noticed that even though the extra pics were resizing on the page, the main product image wasn’t, but it was in the product listings and search results. So I sat down today and ran through the PHP code for the contribution to see what had altered. I had a nagging feeling in my mind that the More Pics contribution had overwritten something that the Auto Thumbnailer was relying on.

After digging through the PHP code in the product_info.php page I noticed the line where the main image is printed to the page

document.write('' . tep_image(DIR_WS_IMAGES . $product_info['products_image'], addslashes($product_info['products_name']), (MOPICS_RESTRICT_PARENT=='false'?'':SMALL_IMAGE_WIDTH), (MOPICS_RESTRICT_PARENT=='false'?'':SMALL_IMAGE_HEIGHT), 'hspace="5" vspace="5"') . '
' . TEXT_CLICK_TO_ENLARGE . ''; ?>');

Here you can see the additions added by the More Pics contrib
(MOPICS_RESTRICT_PARENT=='false'?'':SMALL_IMAGE_WIDTH)
(MOPICS_RESTRICT_PARENT=='false'?'':SMALL_IMAGE_HEIGHT)

Looking at the code (for anyone who doesn’t know PHP) it essentially says if the constant ‘MOPICS_RESTRICT_PARENT’ is set to false then don’t print anything, otherwise print the small image width/height. However this doesn’t control where the image is pulled from, and in the pages the main product image was coming from the original directory and not the resized image cache directory. After removing the if statement and forcing the small image width/height to be printed suddenly it all worked fine again. I’m sure there’s probably a language file somewhere to change to get the same affect but I certainly can’t work out what to change!

So my code now is
document.write('' . tep_image(DIR_WS_IMAGES . $product_info['products_image'], addslashes($product_info['products_name']), SMALL_IMAGE_WIDTH, SMALL_IMAGE_HEIGHT, 'hspace="5" vspace="5"') . ''; ?>');

Which is what it was originally.

A lot of customers won’t want to create an account with you, for whatever reason you don’t want to deter your customers from buying from you. So an express checkout option is a good idea to let those customers who don’t want to create an account still purchase from your store.

Purchase Without Account does the job well for this. It gives a quick route for purchasing keeping both you and your customers happy.

I’ve been trying to add the option for a Customer Title (Mr/Mrs/Miss etc) to an existing store. Without thinking of searching through the contributions I first hacked the code around to deal with it myself, however after I was half way through I realised how complicated osCommerce makes things. On every order it copies the customer’s name and address into a different table thus duplicating the information instead of just referencing the address via a record id. So even if you update the customer’s details the order details for the customer doesn’t update (try this with an order, update the customer’s details and then view the customer’s order and you’ll see their details haven’t changed!).

I had the bulk of the customer’s title script working until I realised it wasn’t working for the Express Checkout option that is already installed on the site. This of course doesn’t use the database in the same way, but relies on sessions more. So after trying to figure out how to fix this I took a look in the contributions on the osCommerce site and came across a Customer Title contribution which also worked with the Purchase Without Account Contribution, which is the express checkout contribution running on the web site. Great, I thought, this should fix all the issues.

So I grabbed the contribution and updated the site files with the code from it, updated the database and tested it on a test site – worked fine apart from one issue, the title wasn’t displaying on an invoice after an order had been made. I then spent an hour or so comparing the code from the contribution to all the admin files trying to connect the dots on how the address was displayed to where it came from etc. Eventually I discovered that all of my code was correct however the actual customer’s title wasn’t being pulled from the database, once I’d fixed that it all worked perfectly

For anyone who does use the contribution and finds the same problem I did simply edit line 28 (ish) in /admin/includes/classes/order.php from

$order_query = tep_db_query("select customers_name, customers_company, etc.

to

$order_query = tep_db_query("select customers_title, delivery_title, billing_title, customers_name, customers_company, etc.

This then pulls the titles out which is what the address format function needs.