Cutting Corners or Chasing Tail?

Posted by Wonder

November 26, 2009

Someone even older and wiser than me used to say “cutting too many corners will have you in a circle, back where you started”.

Started on a new project last week with all the sudden “free time” I had on my hands. Decided to build a new product site based on Oscommerce, a free Open Source shopping cart, as I’d not really gotten into it enough in my 4 days OJT to know how configurable to SEO it might be.

I also decided, for the sake of fast development, to base it on a template.

One of those two things was my first mistake.

PrintStore The thing I’ve always hated about most shopping carts is that they all look the same. I once spent hours and days reconfiguring Zen Cart to never achieve presentation perfection. I thought I’d get a “jump start” on OSC by finding an OScommerce template I could stand and modifying it to my needs from there.

You know how you right click and view the source on a PHP based page you can view just the HTML code for the page? Well, I musta’ forgot how to do that because I bought the template. Now I can print out all 13 pages of that page’s HTML code anytime I want to be totally baffled.

I’ve yet to figure out how to print out just the PHP code. Learnin’ NetBeans as time allows so I will probably get that accomplished in time for my further befuddlement.

How the hell could you possible need 13 pages of HTML to structure a simple page like this: http://hoopshelters.com/index.php/cPath/1?osCsid=4b4a1d601cbe190f02c90c0a93000987? Although there is obviously nothing simple about a URL like that!

So far, I’ve not been able to install even the most basic Oscommerce contributions without breaking my local test site. Now, I’m agonizing whether to start over with Zen Cart, another free PHP cart based on Oscommerce but with many of the contributed enhancements already added in, or to tear this one apart and start from scratch.

So, yep, Gramma, you were right and this could get to be a long story.

OScommerce, Web design

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