The price of this is $97 however for a limited period you can get it for $67 from AIS by Sarah. You can also get the trial version from this site, which includes one eBook action for you to try out and see how easy it is to use.

Anyhow, so which line do you change? Under the products_info.php file find the line:
$products_options_query = tep_db_query("select pov.products_options_values_id, pov.products_options_values_name, pa.options_values_price, pa.price_prefix from " . TABLE_PRODUCTS_ATTRIBUTES . " pa, " . TABLE_PRODUCTS_OPTIONS_VALUES . " pov where pa.products_id = '" . (int)$HTTP_GET_VARS['products_id'] . "' and pa.options_id = '" . (int)$products_options_name['products_options_id'] . "' and pa.options_values_id = pov.products_options_values_id and pov.language_id = '" . (int)$languages_id . "'");

and at the end of the SQL statement add (for ordering by id)
ORDER BY pov.products_options_values_id ASC

giving you
$products_options_query = tep_db_query("select pov.products_options_values_id, pov.products_options_values_name, pa.options_values_price, pa.price_prefix from " . TABLE_PRODUCTS_ATTRIBUTES . " pa, " . TABLE_PRODUCTS_OPTIONS_VALUES . " pov where pa.products_id = '" . (int)$HTTP_GET_VARS['products_id'] . "' and pa.options_id = '" . (int)$products_options_name['products_options_id'] . "' and pa.options_values_id = pov.products_options_values_id and pov.language_id = '" . (int)$languages_id . "' ORDER BY pov.products_options_values_id ASC");

This method orders the attributes by id number, the number you see at the start of the attribute line in the admin section. If you wanted it ordered alphabetically you could use (untested!)
ORDER BY pov.products_options_values_name ASC

or by price
ORDER BY pa.options_values_price ASC

So last night and today I’ve been digging out the various files that are used for the product display and altering them to have the image first and then below the image comes the title, text, price and buy now buttons. On the results listings the image above and the title, price and buy now button on the line below. For the long and thin images this looks quite nice however for the few square images there are it unfortunately doesn’t look too great, however without a lot of rewriting of the HTML and adding in some CSS floats to control where the text sits depending on the image, then this is the next solution.

Pages I’ve had to update have been
product_info.php – for the single display page
bestsellers.php
includes/classes/boxes.php
includes/modules/product_list.php
includes/modules/new_products.php

I had to dramatically alter the boxes.php page, and copy the class usually used for displaying boxes into the product’s own class so that it could be amended just for the product display, as I didn’t know what else it would affect. The trouble was the products came out, one product per row with the image, title, price and buy now button each in a separate column. So getting a second row into the mix and making the first row span 3 columns, was the hardest part. After a lot of trial and error and a missing equals sign (sending the file into a neverending loop!), the products finally started to display correctly.

Unfortunately my client however has been uploading her image photos with a lot of white space on them. All of the photos are on clear white backgrounds however she’s not been cropping them down, so at present some images sit higher above the title and price associated with it than others. It’s also taken me 3 goes to explain to her that I cannot reduce the size between the product image and the text below it as there has been no padding or margins added! I’m hoping once she crops the images she’ll start to get the idea otherwise I’ll be outlining all of the images so that she can see where they start and end for herself!

She mentioned to me last week that she has the option to change the product order on her other site, plus she wanted to offer a gift wrap service as well. So these are two more contributions I need to find along with working out with Protx module to install. Plus edit the product layout!

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.

Unfortunately yesterday we discovered the second test site wasn’t working correctly as it wasn’t picking up the shipping, payment or order modules in the admin and that was causing errors on the front end. So after trying to fix the modules we concluded that there was a server error of some sort and so decided to just update the new domain with our files and continue working directly on that, now that the admin section is finished with the contributions.

This has taken pretty much 24 hours to do however. Our ADSL has slowed down to less than dial up speeds and trying to upload the files for osCommerce has just been a joke. It took about an hour or so to just get the admin section online, and even then some of the files were only partially uploaded, so I’ve had to check every single file to ensure it’s online in its complete state. However finally the files are on the domain and so now I just have to fix the two contributions that aren’t working perfectly and play around with the product layouts a little. Hopefully this’ll all be finished and live soon!

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.

One of my clients asked me to set up a links page and a customer’s testimonials page for her, and set it up so she could add to it. Rather than making her have to trawl through the pages themselves I’ve set up a couple of simple text files using basic code such as paragraph tags, bold (strong) tags etc. For the links I’ve had her list them out in a consistent way and then I use PHP to retrieve the link and text and then link it all in a specific way. However to update these files she has to do them directly online via cPanel (as she didn’t have a clue when I mentioned FTP!). This is of course a major inconvenience to both my client and plenty of other people out there who are not used to trawling through code to find where to update the page text, let alone adding HTML markup!

Anyhow, for us it’s straightforward. A couple of tips I do have when adding page content and creating new pages as well is to also ensure each page has a unique title and uses heading tags and good markup. Whilst the bulk of osCommerce markup is pretty heavy going and tables upon tables, if the content you can easily change and control is as good as possible then you’ve given yourself a little edge you may not have had otherwise.

So what to do? To update the default informational pages and to create further ones (simply copy say the about_us.php file and save it with a new filename), open up one of the files eg. about_us.php. Now the most important part of a web page is the page title, and osCommerce doesn’t really go in for unqiue titles per page (unfortunately), however there’s an easy way around this. On the page go down to the title tag where you’ll see

<title><?php echo TITLE; ?></title>

The TITLE being printed out is the standard title set in the language file, usually the name of your company or store. Of course we should still keep this in the title to give the site consistency and make it clear to visitors which site they’re on. So to edit this simply add in some unique content, a good key phrase that relates to the page before the PHP statement eg.

<title>About Joe Bloggs and Sons, Suppliers of Fine Wines to the UK | <?php echo TITLE; ?></title>

For example…! Okay I appreciate that most pages can’t have a good title but something more than just the store name will be an improvement.

As for your page content, in the PHP page scroll a bit further down you’ll find the page heading ‘About Us’. This will usually be found looking similar to

<td class="pageHeading">About Us</td>

Put this into a header tag. Headers are considered more important on a page than bog standard page text which is what the above is considered as. So to change this simply do the following:

<td><h1 class="pageHeading">About Us</h1></td>

So the header is still in the table cell, and using the same CSS class but is now wrapped by a header tag as well, giving it more importance on the page. Of course with your own text if you feel you can warrant a second heading, use a h2 tag to wrap this header.

I’ll go into detail how to get a unique title for each category and product page another time. It’s a touch more complicated with hacking the PHP, but the results are great for your site!

The template is pretty nice and has so far been easy to edit. It has a nice slick design and breaks out of the standard osCommerce look. I’ve got a few contributions I’ll have to install plus some site alterations but otherwise it’s pretty straightforward and plain sailing so far.