Minor bugs/suggestions/improvements

just a few things i ran into when working with opencart when templating my site.

#1 - address book
- log in as a customer
- click "modify your address book entries"
- click "edit" beside an existing address entry
- heading reads "new address"
- i would like to have this read "edit address", or if it's simpler, just "address" for an edit or add
EDIT: i just realized this text is obviously in the language file, the entry is $_['text_new_address']  = 'New Address'; ... so i could implement the "address" change myself. i guess the only opencart change that could be made here is to have a 'text_edit_address' called on an edit.

#2 - "powered by" copyright notice
- copyright year is hard coded into the language file
- i plan to change this piece of code in the template to retrieve the current year to put a copyright notice beside my company name, so i do not have to update the template every year. i want it to say "MyCompanyName (c) 2005-{CurrentYear}". does it make sense to have opencart provide something like this that can be inserted into a template so "skinners" can retrieve the current year for this purpose? maybe it's too custom, but seems like something that would be useful.

#3 - shop settings required fields
- one thing i hit in the admin was the fact that "telephone" is required in the shop settings page. i don't have a good understanding of where this value is used (other than the contact page), but for my purposes i do not want to give out a phone number. to remedy, i did a template customization to remove it, but my feeling is that no contact information for a shop should be required - it should be left to the discretion of the store owner what information is displayed on that page (if any). the code should consider what has/has not been entered and build the contact us page appropriately (which it does for "fax" already). for example... if no address, telephone, or fax is provided, the first box on the contact us page would not be displayed, only the enquiry form.

would like to hear any thoughts on these!

All your points are very good so I decided to implement them. They will be in the next release.

this solves the year issue

have made this change prev to all my OC sites

$_['text_powered_by'] = 'Design by Hosting-WHSE.com
© '.date("Y").' Hosting-WHSE.com';


int he language file for the footer

thanks! that is what i had planned to do, thanks for doing the legwork for me maybe including this code in the default language file would be helpful to others... or comments to that effect.

yes as much as I love my clients -- I don't need to be buged to change the darn CW dates...  so I do that on most of my sites in general

Hi guys, firstly I wanna thank Daniel for creating this absolutely awesome CMS. I'm busy doing a Computer Science Honours project and my objective is to create a E-commerce portal for developing countries, where informal merchants can sell their goods on the web (carvings and other handmade stuff).

I also have to put in a feature that will allow the Administrator to add and delete merchant accounts and a feature that will allow merchants to log in and view their products and sales reports. I tried using OSCommerce, which is also quite stable and has plenty of useful features, but I prefer the compactness and customizability of OpenCart.

Anyway, I've spent the last two days setting up OpenCart version 0.7.6.1 and playing around with the code and just wanna post a few small bugs that I came across, and how to fix them (might be useful for e-commerce newbies) :

1. Incorrect size of star rating image

The stars image appears to be stretched to the default image size of 100x100 pixels (can be changed in the Admin section).
This problem can be fixed by editing the review_info.tpl file in the catalog\template\default\content folder. On line 14 simply add width=94px height=18px after the class="png" parameter. This is the size of the default stars image and can be changed if one decides to use a different image.

2. SQL error when creating a new customer account

I believe this problem has been mentioned in another thread, but I thought I'd post it here again. This problem can be fixed by accessing the customer table in the database and unchecking the not null properly on the cart variable.

3. SQL error when creating a new category of products

This problem can be fixed by editing the category.php file found in the admin\controller folder. Assuming you are not planning to have any subcategories, you need replace parent_id = '?' on line 38 with parent_id = '0'.

I will post more bug fixes as I find them.

Cheers
Kosta

spetz wrote: Hi guys, firstly I wanna thank Daniel for creating this absolutely awesome CMS. I'm busy doing a Computer Science Honours project and my objective is to create a E-commerce portal for developing countries, where informal merchants can sell their goods on the web (carvings and other handmade stuff).

I also have to put in a feature that will allow the Administrator to add and delete merchant accounts and a feature that will allow merchants to log in and view their products and sales reports. I tried using OSCommerce, which is also quite stable and has plenty of useful features, but I prefer the compactness and customizability of OpenCart.

Anyway, I've spent the last two days setting up OpenCart version 0.7.6.1 and playing around with the code and just wanna post a few small bugs that I came across, and how to fix them (might be useful for e-commerce newbies) :

1. Incorrect size of star rating image

The stars image appears to be stretched to the default image size of 100x100 pixels (can be changed in the Admin section).
This problem can be fixed by editing the review_info.tpl file in the catalog\template\default\content folder. On line 14 simply add width=94px height=18px after the class="png" parameter. This is the size of the default stars image and can be changed if one decides to use a different image.

2. SQL error when creating a new customer account

I believe this problem has been mentioned in another thread, but I thought I'd post it here again. This problem can be fixed by accessing the customer table in the database and unchecking the not null properly on the cart variable.

3. SQL error when creating a new category of products

This problem can be fixed by editing the category.php file found in the admin\controller folder. Assuming you are not planning to have any subcategories, you need replace parent_id = '?' on line 38 with parent_id = '0'.

I will post more bug fixes as I find them.

Cheers
Kosta

Which version are you using? I have none of these problems with version 7.6.

That's quite strange, I'm using 0.7.6.1

It might have to do with the versions of PHP, Apache and MySQL that I'm using.
PHP 5.2
Apache 2.0
MySQL 5.1

The image review problem maybe related to the browser your using and the customer cart database field is already set to Not NULL.

Let me know if you find any more problems.

I'm aware that the cart variable is set to Not NULL by default, but unchecking it seems to have fixed the account problem .