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.

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.

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.