osCommerce Phoenix Discounting

The following discounting modules are now available for Phoenix:

Better Together

Quantity Discounts

Discount Chooser

and also

Discount Preview

The free modules are in the osCommerce App Marketplace, with links on the help page on my site; the commercial modules are in my store (linked on the help page).

There is no Better Together Admin for Phoenix yet; if there is sufficient interest, I’ll create one. But Discount Chooser provides most of the functionality, so you’re covered.

osCommerce is … back?

I’m a pretty skeptical fellow but I must confess to being impressed by some of the work that has been done in osCommerce Phoenix. In particular, building templates using content blocks enabled by admin was an inspired choice.

For modders, if you make the handful of changes described in my Phoenix Tweaks page, your old osC 2.3 code will likely work, but a better path is to adopt Phoenix standards and just update your code.

I have taken the latter approach in Better Together for osCommerce Phoenix. I look forward to updating my other osCommerce modules in the coming months.

osCommerce sessions table HUGE?

If your osCommerce sessions table is the largest table in your database and seems to have grown without bounds, don’t worry – the fix is simple.

Edit the file includes/functions/sessions.php and modify the function tep_session_start. At the top of the function, you want to add

@ini_set('session.gc_probability', 1);
@ini_set('session.gc_divisor', 2);

Once this file has been installed, and once a few visitors have come to your osCommerce store, the table will be smaller. But wait! You’re not done yet.

Go into PHPMyAdmin and select your store’s database. Select the sessions table, and at the bottom of the list of tables, press the “With selected:” dropdown and select “Optimize table”. This will take a minute to run, and once it’s complete, you’ll see a big reduction in the size of your sessions table.

How the osCommerce sessions table looked before (1G)
How the table looked before (1G)
How the table looked after (48 Kb)
How the table looked after (48 Kb)

Photo credit: image by James Hammond on Unsplash.

Is osCommerce Dead?

I’m a Zen Cart guy, so normally the only thing I have to say about osCommerce is, “Them’s fighting words!”

But Gary Burton is a true open source hero, who has provided an upgrade path for merchants whose businesses depend on an active branch of osCommerce that works with modern versions of PHP. Thank you, Gary, for your leadership in creating the Frozen and Edge branches of osCommerce.

https://github.com/gburton/Responsive-osCommerce

Fixing osCommerce Authorize.Net failures

Are your customers getting bounced back to the checkout payment page of your osCommerce site after entering their credit card details on the checkout confirmation page and submitting?

If Authorize.Net credit card processing on your osCommerce site is suddenly failing, the issue may be that you need to update your certificate file.  Go to

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AuthorizeNet/sdk-php/master/lib/ssl/cert.pem

and grab the contents.  Put it in a file named authorize.net.crt and upload it to

ext/modules/payment/authorizenet/authorize.net.crt.

 

Better Together Admin now 50% off

Now that Discount Chooser is becoming the gold standard for discounting offers in ZenCart, osCommerce, and (soon) OpenCart, I have decided to reduce the price of Better Together Admin.Better Together Admin for Zen Cart and Better Together Admin for osCommerce are now price reduced to just $30 for software only, or $90 for the software plus installation. If you have been holding off on buying the Better Together Admin Panel, now is your chance.

If your discounting needs are limited to BOGO style offers, Better Together is still a great choice, so I hope a lot of people will take advantage of this lower price.

Welcome, Discount Chooser and Discount Spender!

When I first created Free Gift Chooser, it only offered 100% discounts (“free gifts”), based on the content of the cart. About a year later, I added the ability to do price reductions – percentage or dollar based. So the name “Free Gift Chooser” was no longer very accurate.

With the pending release of the Free Gift Chooser algorithm for OpenCart, I’m taking this opportunity to rename the Zen Cart and osCommerce versions of Free Gift Chooser to Discount Chooser (and similarly, to rename Free Gift Spender for Zen Cart to Discount Spender).

Same powerful discounting software; new name!