OpenCart Community

First issue: Search Engine Optimized URLs are unfiltered
I have product names containing URL-unfriendly characters (ampersands and other nasty characters). The SEO URL function in opencart will just throw the name right into the URL and that's no good! It breaks the links! I think there should be a filter in place that allows only A-Z and 0-9 characters there.

(From a search I've discovered that several people have reported trouble getting SEO URLs to work- you need to edit the .htaccess file where opencart is installed and change to )

Second issue:
Products without images should not use alt text (item name is used as alt text for some reason). Alt text is not really necessary for any product images because the item name is already there in every case. Because of the alt text, I am seeing the item names two times whereever there is no product image in place. I should not need to upload product images just to mask the issue!

Other thoughts:
*Coupon length limit should be much longer by default (I know how to change it thanks)
*Coupon expiration date and other such dates are limited by the 2038 bug (PHP's fault)
*Image uploader could use a little work but it's ok.
*Nice job on the great open source cart guys! Puts the proprietary ones to shame!

alt text is there for seo.

Daniel wrote:alt text is there for seo.

I know that. I don't want search engines to find or reference my images anyway. There should be a way to turn it off at least when no image is present (how about an option in the admin panel in the future).

sds wrote:I don't want search engines to find or reference my images anyway.

use a robots.txt file

There should be a way to turn it off at least when no image is present (how about an option in the admin panel in the future).

Too many options starts bloating the software. Everyone has their own unique requirements. If all were catered for in the core, we would end up with a complicated huge piece of software, harder to mod and slower to load.
It's much easier to just remove the alt tags in the template files and use a robots.txt to disallow crawling the image folder.

sds wrote:First issue: Search Engine Optimized URLs are unfiltered
I have product names containing URL-unfriendly characters (ampersands and other nasty characters). The SEO URL function in opencart will just throw the name right into the URL and that's no good! It breaks the links! I think there should be a filter in place that allows only A-Z and 0-9 characters there.

The url's use the "seo keyword" field and it is only used in the url's, so just don't put URL unfriendly characters in there.

*Coupon expiration date and other such dates are limited by the 2038 bug (PHP's fault)

not too worried about this I have a feeling that opencart will be greatly changed by 2038.

sds wrote:I know that. I don't want search engines to find or reference my images anyway.

I would think twice about this. I've gotten sales from people doing image searches.

Xsecrets wrote:

sds wrote:

*Coupon expiration date and other such dates are limited by the 2038 bug (PHP's fault)

not too worried about this I have a feeling that opencart will be greatly changed by 2038.

Wish I was that organised. I can't even get myself organised for Christmas 2010, let alone think about 2038 (if I am still alive then)

alt tags are part of good coding...? just edit the template

rsands wrote:alt tags are part of good coding...? just edit the template

alt tags are also required for W3C compliance.