The new store needs to have more than one product photo per product. It’s selling contemporary gifts, some of which are pens so the client wants to have a full photo plus close ups of the nib and other parts. The client has an existing osCommerce store which already allows extra photos however the script was put in place by the company that originally set the store up but they only got it half working.

So whilst looking for the thumbnail script I came across another contribution called more pics. This allows you to add up to 6 photos for each product.

After installing the contribution on my test site I logged into the admin area, checked the new configuration page for it and then went to add a product. Suddenly I was faced with a similar screen to my client’s other osCommerce store with the half working more photos script. I then realised it is infact the same script except the original developers clearly didn’t follow the simple instructions as they only seemed to install half of the contribution! On the old store my client doesn’t have a configuration page, nor can they remove any additional photos. So once I’ve got this working on the new store and have that all up and running I’ll probably get the script properly installed on the old store too.

I’m just hoping that I can get the auto thumbnailer script to work on the extra photos too. If it doesn’t automatically I’m sure a few tweaks will do the trick.

 

I never realised until today that the thumbnails in osCommerce product pages aren’t actual thumbnails but use HTML height and width attributes to constrain the image! My client called asking how she could have both very wide/non tall thumbnails and also square ones. At the time I assumed osCommerce resized and created a thumbnail on upload, but after having a look and running a couple of tests I realised this wasn’t the case! I always wondered why some thumbnails didn’t look sharp compared to the originals.

Considering how simple it is to resize photos in PHP I’m very suprised that osCommerce doesn’t do this. Perhaps the new version will, but for now a contribution will do the job just as well. I came across the Automatic Thumbnailer which doesn’t create thumbnails when you add the product to the database, but it creates one when the product photo is first viewed (be it on the product’s page, what’s new or other section). It creates a thumbnail image using the sizes set in your configuration for the maximum height or width. The thumbnails are still kept in proportion but this time they’re resized and kept sharp. I’ve run it on a test site and it does the job fine so I’m hoping it’ll work well with the new site too.

Also just one page to edit with a small section of code to paste in, so very easy to add in and will cut down on bandwidth usage too.

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I’ve set this blog up to write up the progress and information I come across whilst setting up a new store and also updating other stores for clients. I’m relatively new to using osCommerce so I’m not a hardcore expert but more of a native PHP user trying to learn the interface and look for contributions before hacking the code to pieces!

I have a few clients running osCommerce sites and am being asked to set up new sites as well. It’s a different challenge from the norm and despite finding annoyances with osCommerce I’m also enjoying using something different and learning new things.

So I’ll be starting off with the updates I’ve made to one clients site, helpful titbits I’ve done along the way, and also the new site we’re setting up as well, using a prebuilt template from the Templates section.

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