eCommerce News & Resources by oscommerceuniversity.com

by David Graham. Well, after a bit of research yesterday, and some maintenance on my exeLearning editor, I began today to build the Fundamentals of eCommerce course. While it is not yet complete, I have uploaded my efforts so far to the site, and will continue to update the package as I work. Wikipedia is featured heavily at the moment, but other pertinent sites will be included as well. This in addition to my own articles and excerpts from Inside CRE Loaded: Volume 1 (ICL1). Its been awhile since I prepared training materials, and as the best tool for the job at the time was an NROFF compatible text formatter on my OS-9 (Microware - not that Apple rip-off!) it has taken some time to get used to EXE. I highly recommend it to anyone considering building training materials though. The use of "iDevices" (Instructional Devices) makes sense, and helps structure the development task nicely. I also worked a bit with Wink 2.0. This freely available FLASH tutorial development tool is definitely going to see a workout over the coming months. Building the installation and usage tutorials for osCommerce 2.2 RC1, Zen Cart, osC Max and CRE Loaded will be a bit time consuming, but I'm looking forward to the job with such a straightforward piece of software. I plan to make some of these tools available for osC family hosting firms to use in customer support as soon as they are ready.... Another interesting project in progress is the Doxygenation of CRE Loaded. The RCI class is documented, though I am still working on a good method of developing an index of call points. Other functions and classes will follow soon, and this cross referenced document will be posted in our resource center. No Comments

by David Graham. Well, it has been awhile since I posted here, and a progress report is way overdue, so here goes. First, I've completed our first FLASH tutorial on CRE Loaded. This movie covers installation, and will be followed within a week on equivalent material covering osC Max (60% done), Zen Cart and osCommerce (each about 10% complete). WINK has been a real blessing. This free Open Source Flash tutorial creator (found at http://debugmode.com) manages screen captures in a variety of ways which make capturing tutorials a relatively quick and easy task. Additional tasks such as affects for video markup are a bit more involved, but the package is definitely well worth investigation! I have a pretty good sized number of tutorials to create before I can launch a full course, but I expect to be able to move more quickly as I get the first dozen or so created. No Comments

by David Graham.

Well, more progress!

General Note: Its been a difficult few weeks, hardware issues having slowed work down tremendously. I had to replace my hard drive, and reinstall the operating system. Fortunately, my data was stored on a separate drive and I've lost very little other than time. Tutorial Preparation: Zen Cart installation remains a problem, and work there is stalled at the moment, though recent server changes at hosting-4-creloaded.com may resolve this situation and allow resumption of development. Tutorials on the remaining distribution have been put into Flash form and posted for review by gracious members of the CRE Loaded Beta team, and the users of the osC Max forums. Feedback so far has been good, particularly from the osC Max community - Thanks! Course Development. Development of Moodle courses has resumed. The CRE Loaded rough draft is now sufficiently advanced to be used, and has been posted as our first complete course module. It is complete in that at least each topic tells a complete story. I will be adding more resources to them and fleshing this out. But it works as a course as it stands, including lessons, quizzes and a final exam. The work on this course provides an excellent springboard for osCommerce standard and osC Max development which I expect to have complete within a week. Once the Zen Cart installation issues are resolved, that course also can be finished expeditiously. Next up on course offerings will be store configuration. I've conducted a review of our offerings and noticed the following. In evaluating the eCommerce fundamentals course, it is apparent I'm going to need to break it down into smaller chunks to make it easier to manage. It is just TOO unwieldy. The installation courses will need more resources. In particular I've choses to cover FTP related issues usually uncovered by a community which focuses on how to use a client program, and left client program usage uncovered. I'll put more resources there, and add test questions to make sure the student can use one. This can be better addressed as I break out parts of the eCommerce fundamentals course into modules. The University Book Store Development of content on the "http://www.oscommerceuniversity.com" title="University Book Store" target="_blank">University Book Store continues, and we are now able to dispense with the categories box, and use the page box as a Site Directory. This should improve traffic flow downward in the site. Next up is work on better connections from the school to the store. As we start building commercial courses this will be important. Also coming up in content development will be more material related to supporting programs and books. Pithy Productions, Inc. offerings will be documented, including sales links as several of their books will be used in upcoming courses. Magnetic One products will be included, as well. I plan to feature them in several courses, as use of desktop tools to manage a store is becoming a highly valued option in some parts of the community. The third focus of content development will be extending the FAQ system to provide more coverage of CRE Loaded, and initial coverage of osCommerce, osC Max and Zen Cart. We also have some potential for multilingual development coming up. Arrangements are in progress for generating French language translations of course materials and multimedia publications. So, while I've not written much in the past month, its certainly been a busy one, and osCommerce University continues to grow. I'm pretty excited about getting course material live and starting educational activities. Hope to hear some feedback from students and see more posting in our forums soon! No Comments

by David Graham.

Well, finally got Inside CRE Loaded revisions done. The eBook is compiled and deployed. I'm happy to see that done, as we were able to include a great deal of new content which brings the book much closer to what I had originally envisioned. The new revision contains more "How-To" content, adding process summaries after the informational material and bringing the book much closer to being exactly the text book we'll need going forward. We changed the title slightly, it is now "Inside CRE Loaded: Volume 1 - Essential Blueprints", and has been issued an ISBN number. This brings us much closer to preparing a paperback title which will make the material available more easily to Mac, Linux and Asian PC users. Product Keys is complete as well, and is likely to see sales on other sites. While I really don't want to focus on software development, it is definitely essential at this point that the university create as many sales as it can from software we have to develop for in house use. Fortunately, this seems to be mostly complete with RSS feed management being the remaining task to tackle. I plan to manage this with a merger of some general XML/RSS generation code into the Import/Export module system so that others can pick that up and build a good replacement for Easy Populate. This should be cross platform stuff eventually running on osCommerce, and osC Max at least. The RSS Feed project is already generating instructional material for future coding classes. As part of building the separate page system I wanted for this content, I generated a page template set. This consists of two files, a root file and a content template file. These will be used in generating the Flash content I will use along with Inside CRE Loaded to build the basic coding courses. No Comments

Well, I took time this morning to do some rather overdue site updates.

After the recent CRE Loaded SQL Injection vulnerability report, the store was updated pretty quickly. In the process, I noticed some omissions in maintaining the store front in synch with the Moodle contents. The new osCommerce installation course was not present, nor was our new Cafe Press shop. Those are now linked.

RSS feeds are coming to the front page soon as well - with this blog being fed to a mainpage module in order to improve visibility and content density. This should help get more news to more people.. There are some issues yet in CRE Loaded's Content Director System. Top level URL overrides don't function as expected. This has forced my link to this blog down to a secondary page. Further, updates become a bit dicey if you don't remember all the original installation details. I'll have to add this type thing into the upcoming installation and upgrade checklist forms, though that is a bit further down the timeline than the templating tutorials... I have continued to work on two templates over the past month or so, as time between writing bouts allowed. The first one is a Web 2.0 "Amazon Style" template. This one has taken quite awhile because it involves some Javascript, something I have not worked with directly before. The process has been interesting, and I owe Kiran a debt of gratitude for his help with the integration of the floating menu script attached to the main navigation bar. This project is a primarily commercial cooperative venture based on the template at http://www.oscommerce-resources.com. We have a bit of work left to do yet but the working code already includes a few interesting points for those who follow template design for CRE Loaded stores. The Javascript inclusion is moved mostly to the bottom of the page. This should speed page rendering and initial results tend to bear this out. The second template will adorn osCommerce University - and form the basis of a class in development of ATS templates. I'm hoping also to have time to strip down the boxes.tpl.php classes, and get some serious optimization on both of these packages - while generating some useful Flash content and development tools as part of the educational package. No Comments