Edmonds Commerce Blog

A common requirement for oscommerce store owners is to try to get pages loading faster.

Part of the problem is that each oscommerce install is different, with a mixture of contributions and bespoke customisations all making their own database queries and causing their own problems. The first part of the solution is to actually be able to see what is going on. For this you need to install the Output Queries Debug contribution for osCommerce.

After that, it is really down to looking through the debug information and tracking down the errant code or SQL and trying to tidy it up.

This is something we specialise in, if you need any help getting your oscommerce store up to speed, simply get in touch.

Sometimes you need to get in there and reset the password for oscommerce using phpMyAdmin.

In these instances, you do not just paste in a new password but you have to properly encode it first.

Here is a really handy tool to create a password hash for you, ready to be pasted into phpMyAdmin

for the admin side, you will need to edit the admin table and paste this into the password field for the account you need to set the password for.

Check out this easy oscommerce password generator

If you are constantly dealing with complex file structures and accessing various folders, the traditional “window for each folder” approach can quickly leave you with a cluttered work space and you may find your self taking time to find the right window.

For Ubuntu users, the PCMan file browser comes to the rescue with not only noticably faster file browsing but also firefox style tab support.

This is a real productivity enhancer and is an absolute pleasure to use.

You can download the easily installed deb package from here

http://www.getdeb.net/app/PCMan+File+Manager

You might struggle getting your Hewlett Packard printer to work with Ubuntu, I know I did.

However Ubuntu now comes with something called HPLIP installed. You can find it and install it using synaptic package manager

To get your printer to actually work simply run sudo hp-setup from the command line

http://hplip.sourceforge.net/install/step4/index.html

While recently migrating a client from a dedicated server which was proving a little too expensive over to one of the great value Linux Virtual Private Servers offered by Web Fusion, I found myself frustrated with the 2mb upload limit apparent in the control panel side of things.

So I went and edited the php.ini to allow for a more generous upload limit. Restarted the server but to no effect.

After a closer inspection I realised that the Plesk control panel actually had its own separate php.ini file. Edited this file and it works.

Another Problem Solved

One of the most arduous task in maintaining and ecommerce web site is the constant task of keeping all of your products up to date. Suppliers like to release new price lists and product ranges on at least a yearly basis. Just when you have managed to get your web site completely up to date, the rug is pulled out from under you and you have to start all over again…

Its a never ending task and if not handled carefully can soak up ridiculous amounts of staff time. Staff time means expense as any business financial director will tell you on wages day.

There are some great gains to be made in automating the task of keeping a product catalogue up to date. The popular ecommerce platform osCommerce has a contribution called easypopulate which is an essential addition. CREloaded and other flavours of enhanced osCommerce tend to ship with easypopulate installed by default.

Its a great script, but for a very large site with a lot of demands the script does need a little extra work to make it the fully fledged backup, restore, update and insert products tool that a serious ecommerce business needs.

Most platforms either come with or have contributions or modules you can install to enable bulk importing and updating of products which definitely makes things faster. However if you are finding that you or your staff are creating these spreadsheets by hand in your spreadsheet programme then there are still amazing efficiences to be achieved.

In fact, once you get really serious, you start hitting the row limits of common spread sheet programmes which means you literally can not open the entire product feed for editing. Once you are at this kind of size (or a lot less) you will find that your computer is very sluggish and editing becomes a slow and tedious task.

A much better way is to use custom written scripts for processing your information into the correct format for your bulk updating system. This is something that Edmonds Commerce specialise in and we have many happy customers who are saving countless hours by having software for the hard work.

The ultimate solution is to recieve product information in a feed from your suppliers. This is generally a very fast and reliable way of grabbing all of the product information for a particular supplier. However not all suppliers supply a feed. Others do supply a feed, but it is missing crucial information.

In this kind of scenario, it is usually possible to actually develop a script which will grab all of the required information and images directly from your suppliers web site. The familiar copying and pasting scenario but done by a script rather than a member of staff. Thousands of products can be grabbed in an hour and all outputed into a file correctly formatted for immediate upload into your bulk updating system such as Easypopulate for oscommerce.

Again this is a real speciality of Edmonds Commerce, though you may find that the average web design company does not have this kind of service to offer as it is a bit unusual and involves a steep learning curve.

For more information on this subject please do get in touch

Like a pheonix rising from the ashes, Demonoid - one of the most highly regarded torrent trackers on the internet has returned after being shut down back in November 2007.

For anyone that was a member of Demonoid, this is amazing news as it truly was/is one of those resources that once you have had it, you feel like you can not live without it.

So well done to the people behind demonoid, may it continue to be the premier site for finding all of the torrents you need.

After a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs responding to pressure from the dutch and then (after a quick relocation) the canadian authorities the site was taken down completely in November 2007.

Now the site has returned, albeit with a new web master as Deimos has stood down from administering the site.

Hopefully Demonoid is here to stay this time. You can’t keep a good web site down!

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One of the most popular SEO contributions (community supplied open source modifications) for osCommerce is the SEO URLs system supplied by Chemo.

Chemo was famous on the osCommerce scene for a long time and supplied a great many highly useful contributions. One of his best contributions to osCommerce in my opinion is this forum thread where he investigates and discusses the steps needed to speed up the standard osCommerce.

For any store with a large catalogue, some of these steps are pretty much essential. Whilst the thread does not cover every single thing that a large site would need to do in order to get down to fraction of a second load times, it does cover a lot - and it also gives you the ideas you need to track down further areas in the osCommerce code base that are not as efficient as they could be.

Chemo’s SEO URLs though are not a contribution I would recommend installing on any site that has a large catalogue. The reason being that Chemo has sacrificed a lot in terms of performance in order to make the contribution easy to set up for the average web master. I totally applaud his generosity in developing such a contribution and for many sites it will perform admirably with no need for special PHP skills to install.

At Edmonds Commerce we have tackled speed issues for large osCommerce sites and have found that we needed to code our own SEO URLs system which is much more streamlined but does require a lot more edits and customisations to work.

If you are interested in getting your osCommerce store to run fast, or would like more info about our SEO URLs system - simply get in touch.

If you are a windows user, you may be familiar with the Beyond Compare programme which is used to compare two text files. This can be an invaluable tool when you are debugging or tracking changes as it highlights for you any differences between two text files.

For Ubuntu, there is an excellent programme called Meld which offers the same functionality and works very well. You can download and install it easily using the Add/Remove tool in your applications menu.

You can read all about Meld here

Another great open source linux package!

MySQL dumps are often used as a quick and easy way of backing up an entire MySQL database in one go. However, they are only really designed to restore whole databases as well. So what if you only want to restore certain tables?

I have written this nice little PHP script which will take your dump file and split it into lots of little sql files - one for each table. You can then restore which ever tables you want.

Simply create a php file in the same directory as your dump file. Name it something easy to remember. Then go to it in your web browser, input the name of the dump file and click go.

As this is a fairly massive task (depending on the size of your dump file) you may find it works better on your local test server with some generous php_ini settings for max_execution_time etc.