Category Archives: Web sites

Adding a CSS standard to oscMax

I’ve been reading and trying a lot of options in my effort to have my web sites and specifically oscMax stores present nicely in all browsers.

Enter the concepts of css frameworks and having read multiple posts including this article from the respected A List Apart I am sure that this will aid me in getting the desired end result.

With that all in mind I’ve read the following articles and found them helpful:

That’s a start on the how and why. For the moment I am going to run with Blueprint and see what that brings to the party.

oscMax templates IE9 vs Firefox vs Chrome

Ok, so I’ve worked through a heap of design and css and code and stuff in the past few weeks while I tried to make sense of the BTS process in oscMax.

I had a test site layout done and was working through some minor details using Chrome as my preferred browser when it occurred to me that I had not looked at it with Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Results? Yep, Firefox was identical to Chrome and Internet Explorer broke it completely.

So since IE version whatever it was 10 years ago to the latest version 9 we still cannot just design a page or a site template. We must do crazy extra work to address the very special Microsoft interpretation of web standards in HTML and CSS.

Just to make sure it was not just me, I have run up an oscMax site with the Compromise template that it was claimed took an oscMax guru just 15 minutes to convert from an open source CSS theme into oscMax. That 15 minutes would be great except that in Internet Explorer 9 the design does not work.

Whats this blog entry really about? Just noting the fact that regardless of any special template system in oscMax or of how ‘easy’ creating a template may be, there is still the issue of many hours being consumed in design to cater for the variety of web browsers that potential oscMax store visitors will use.

Creating templates for oscMax is just as complex as for any other site.

Update: I figured that this link may come in handy for IE version comparison from MSDN

Documentation on how to use Templates in osCmax

The previous post on BTS in osCmax consisted of running notes as I worked. Having done all of that I realised that I was mis-directed in what I was doing.

Applying all the changes to the main_page.html and it’s siblings I found that this applied it to every page in the site. Hmm, not the desired result. So I’ve delved further and read further and while I am still not clear there are several posts that help, if you put them all together.

In the osCmax Wiki the current 2.5 BTS documentation provides general information.

The first reference in the osCmax forums is this lengthy tutorial on modifying a osCommerce style template to suit. It probably still applies or adds knowledge but it is getting a bit dated.

I’ll add other links here as I find them.

Searching for free or even retail osCmax templates appears to generate few results with almost none available, or at least I ain’t found them. Sites proclaiming to have them return blank results when searching or checking the osCmax category. So I need to be able to roll-my-own.

My first blog entry on Modifying Templates in osCmax was a helpful learning exercise for me albeit misguided and I’ve used that as the kick-off for the next steps which is to ensure that I can control all pages in the site with minimal coding edits (i.e. I don’t want to modify the core product if I can avoid it.) and using the database entries and template process as much as possible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

cURL returns 0 due to DNS error on SME Server

In my trials of getting Gallery and WordPress to interact on SME Server I discovered that I had not configured my DNS settings correctly.

If you use one SME Server then this will not be an issue. It will only arise in a multiple SME Server network and only if you are a bit slack, as I was, with setting the various hostnames.

In a single SME Server all the host names are setup automatically and you can add additional aliases for your server. This will never impact on cURL as when it is used the localhost DNS responds correctly.

In my case I have a second SME Server that is set up for my dev sites and is imaginatively called devsites as an alias. I set this up in the primary server hostnames for the same IP address as my dev sites server and as that worked for all the workstations in my network I promptly forgot about it.

As I worked with Gallery and WordPress plugins I found that cURL was not responding correctly and it took me a while to finally try using cURL at the command line on the server to establish the issue.

Testing cURL at the command line made it obvious.
[php]# curl -v http://devsites.mydomain/mysite/gallery/index.php[/php]
results in
[php]* getaddrinfo(3) failed for devsites.mydomain:80
* Couldn’t resolve host ‘devsites.mydomain’
* Closing connection #0
curl: (6) Couldn’t resolve host ‘devsites.mydomain’
[/php]

Obviously if cURL cannot resolve the host, the plugin will never work.

Adding the alias to the local machine meant that it would now resolve the DNS entry and cURL could do its lookup.

The specific gallery / wordpress plugin is Gallery3 Media Picker and I documented the specifics of what I did in the picker.php to provide support if cURL is not working in the appropriate thread in the Gallery 3 Forums.