Thread: Modifying OsCommerce

OsCommerce is so easy to use because of all the add-ons (or contributions) which are available. These can be installed on top of a vanilla (plain) version of OsCommerce easily.

Many contributions and a few payment modules will require certain files to be overwritten. This isn't possible with a store that's already been modified.

Manual Install

One method of installing these contributions is to do so manually. Sometimes the author will be kind enough to tell you what code needs to be inserted into which files. In this case it's simply a matter of opening up the php files in your favorite PHP editor (or simply notepad) and pasting in the new sections.

If you're not so lucky then you will need to compare the files.

Comparing Files

Comparing the contents of two PHP files would be very time consuming and virtually impossible. A great way to speed the process up is to use a piece of software to do the job for you.

WinMerge ([URL="http://www.winmerge.org"]www.winmerge.org[/URL]) is a free tool which can compare two PHP or text files together. The differences are highlighted which will make it really easy to decide what needs to be copied where.

However you do this you should make sure that you back up the original file just in case you make a mistake.

Hi,

I've tried to do this but can't quite figure it out. I open the files and then click the button to merge them. This seems to work by copying all of the content between the two files.

However when I upload this new file it has destroyed my template. Any ideas? I'm keen to do this myself rather than hiring another developer to help me out again!

Cheers

Andy

Hi Andy,

Sounds like you're trying to merge the entire file which isn't going to work. Unfortunately nothing is that easy! This will just copy anything across which isn't any different to replacing the files.

Instead of using the copy all left or copy all right options you need to look at each difference. It's normally fairly simple to work out what you need to keep and what needs to be adjusted. Any changes to the file should have comments next to them which will make it possible to decide which parts need to remain unchanged.

As all of the differences are highlighted in yellow it is normally simple. This isn't always the case though and it can still be very confusing! Still it's much easier using winmerge than trying to do everything by hand

Hope this helps, let me know if you need more information

Andrew