So with this in mind we needed something to allow her to view unpaid orders ie. orders that hadn’t officially been paid for but in theory should have because the customer clicked to pay. After a bit of searching and testing I came across orderCheck, a contribution which creates a temporary version of the customer’s order before they leave your site to pay. If the customer pays and returns successfully the temp order is removed and appears in the Orders section, however if something goes wrong the order is still clear to see in the orderCheck section. It’s almost identical to the Orders section and allows the client to update and ‘push’ the order through manually if and when needed.

We’ll be installing this on all the osCommerce stores we maintain, simply because it saves any problems and hassle of having to work through the database and the basket information to work out what someone’s paid for. Afterall it doesn’t sound professional having to ask a customer what they ordered.

This is quite a nice contribution as it gives the owner a greater control over what their visitors see when they first reach the site (providing they enter via the front page of course!). I’ve not found any problems with it yet and it was easy enough to incorporate it into the new design.

This is a pretty good way to get your site well indexed within the search engines. It gives them a page which isn’t using a dynamic URL (ie. a URL with a question mark and extra variables in) which they have more trust in. Then the search engine spiders will follow these links and get deeper into your site, indexing the category pages thus giving you more scope within the search engines.

Very easy to set up and a great feature to have.

I’ve configured it with the correct merchant name and what I believe to be the correct password (although this has come from my client so they may have their wires crossed) however on trying it out today I got the VSP Error Screen. Unfortunately Protx don’t seem to offer much info for the integration of their system on your website. I looked through their PDFs and couldn’t find the answers I needed, and the Protx form readme file doesn’t tell you much. So I’m a bit stuck at present and am going to have to trawl through the forums on osCommerce.com to see if I can find an answer, unless anyone here can give me one!

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.

Because of the product photos in use, some are long and narrow, others are square. Not ideal really, but we’ve got to work around these issues. So the product results and product info page has to be displayed in a different manor to the usual image on the left, detail on the right. Plus the Auto thumbnailer doesn’t seem to be working on the main product photo, just the extra photos and the search results pages. So a bit more PHP investigating is needed, along with still having to fix the Customer Title issues.

So there isn’t too much left to do, just a few PHP fixes here and there, and then probably a bit of CSS trickery to deal with the product info page dependent on the photo size.

Contributions Used:

• Auto Thumbnailer
• More Pics
• Customer Title
• Purchase Without Account

All went fine until I realised that the Customer Title contrib has been designed to be used with PWA 0.8, and the latest version of PWA is 1.12+ and has been written in a completely different way. I first used the Title contrib on another existing store which is running on an earlier version of PWA and the contrib merged in fine, but with this new version several of the PWA files are not used now as it’s been set to use existing files instead, which is fine except that I can’t seem to get the Title to save and display on the order pages and invoice.

To add to that the auto thumbnailer is not working on the product info page for the main product, yet it is working on the product listings pages and on the extra pics, so again a bit baffling and some more code that I’ll have to go through to determine what’s being missed and where. I had the thumbnailer working on my test site so clearly something is slightly different which is causing it to not play ball.

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

Most contributions mention about using a file comparison program which I downloaded today to try it out after I was going crossed eyed at comparing files manually. Beyond Compare is a fantastic program that makes the job ten times easier. After running this program and comparing two files I shot through the comparison so quickly I was amazed. This program could have been used so many times in the past and is definitely on my shopping list of software to buy next month! You get a 30 day trial but it works out to around $30 to buy (I think!).

If you need to compare files then this is the program for you.

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.