Month: June 2008

Posted on

Recipient Name

Well, I just released a new contribution that I think everyone needs…

Its an extension to the /admin/orders.php page in osCommerce. It needed yet more useful information. What more do you want?

The recipient name (in the osCommerce DB its aka delivery_name) was a recent necessity for a client because he couldn’t find an order. The recipient knew who sent it but the sender [customer] also sent to many other persons. The only way to find that specific order was by looking into each order the sender made.

This contribution was a work-a-round for that type of dilemma, but again it seemed useful so I released it as a contribution, click here.

Oh, it’s easy install. all you have to do is edit a few lines in /admin/orders.php

Posted on

Finding/Editing BOX_WIDTH

I spent some time looking for BOX_WIDTH because I needed to change the width of my admin boxes. It’s where you’d expect it but it isn’t so obvious…

Public viewable boxes…

/includes/application_top.php
~line 61

Admin boxes…

/admin/includes/application_top.php
~line 52

BTW, your lines might be different depending on your version of osCommerce.

Happy Coding,
Thuan

Posted on

Bad Godaddy Customer Service Again

The theme seems to be consistent and not changing any time soon: Godaddy has bad customer service. Just today May 5, 2008, I messed up and deleted my one and only hosting account from Godaddy. What? Yeah, I read too fast. 🙁 Anyways, luckily it was an account that had not been fully setup and in it’s developmental stage. It would have been nice to get the all the files (I had some) back but not all.

Forget asking Godaddy for any help, it would’ve cost me $150 for Godaddy to recover the files for me! So, I quickly declined the offer and was asked by the Godaddy Rep, “Is there any else he can help with?” I said yes, “The cancel items button shouldn’t be readily available through your credit-card screen (where I messed up). Because I thought I was canceling renewal of the items.”

But before I could finish, Moses started to point out how stupid I was. Lets just say before I ask to speak to he’s manager, we were literally yelling at each other. I am sorry, but it doesn’t really matter how stupid a customer is, YOU DON’T YELL AT THEM!

This is the type of reason other slightly more expensive hosts still exist. I hate the fact that they are so cheap, I can’t help but use some of their services. Well, I have finally excepted that their customer service is mediocre at best and only use them when necessary. Be careful, be very very careful.

Posted on

Estimated Shipping Before Signup/Checkout

With today’s technology, it’s really sad that “big” companies are still having a hard time estimating shipping cost before signup/checkout. I mean even if its not accurate, a reasonable estimate should suffice.

I know I am not alone on this…

When you are shopping at a new “site” and found one of their products to be exceptionally priced and want to see the total (product+shippping)…

Do you sign up or just drop the cart in all?

I personally have dropped the cart over half the time. Have any thoughts on this? Drop a comment. Oh, what company am I ranting about? GNC. 😡

-Thuan

Posted on

Agree to Terms then Confirm

I couldn’t find a “Agree To Terms” module that was really simple to set up so I made one. There are a few out there but they required changing the database and/or javascript and/or the osCommerce checkout process.

My contribution only edits the checkout_confirmation.php page but doesn’t change the checkout process at all. It simply takes the user to conditions.php so he/she can read it or redirects him/her back to the homepage.

Sounds interesting? Click Here, to download it. Enjoy…

Posted on

osCommerce and OpenSSL

How does one get OpenSSL to work after you have enabled osCommerce’s “PayPal Website Payments Standard” module? That is actually a very hard question to answer even with my IT knowledge. But with a lot of research and the piecing together of two articles, I was able to get everything working…

My primary challenge was I couldn’t figure out, “how to generate the encryption keys on my shared hosting Linux server”… necessary for OpenSSL to work. I eventually learned that the keys are not generated from the servers, you only upload the keys to the server. Just as you would with standard html files.

osCommerce OpenSSL

As you can see the module calls for: 2 keys generated by you, and the only way I was able to generate “both” keys was by following a post by Martin Hughes-Jones, click here.

For the remainder of the field items asked by the module I followed a Lunarpages post, click here.

A few notes:

  • Your file paths will not match mine.
  • The keys should be in a password protected folder, e.g. I put mine in a folder called openssl in my admin folder.
  • Don’t forget to create the “working directory” folder… or you will get an error as I did.

Well, that’s it, your osCommerce “PayPal Website Payments Standard” web payments are now encrypted.

Posted on

Free Internet Security

Internet security, who doesn’t need it? Trick question… we all do. But do we all have to pay for it? The answer is no. There are numerous companies that offer free: anti-virus, firewall, and anti-spyware software. The hard thing is to figure out which combination of the freebies will do good enough of a job protecting your system. Lucky for you I recently needed “free internet security”, so I just went through the process of installing, uninstalling, and testing all available antiviruses, firewalls, and antispyware I could find off the net. And the winners are:

Antivirus: Avast! Home Edition
Firewall: ZoneAlarm Firewall
Spyware: Microsoft Defender

Download and install all three if you want your internet security to be “complete”.