December 2009 – ReloadedPC Ashland, Ohio

Zen-Cart

Zen-cart is an excellent open source ecommerce shopping cart system. One of the features I like about Zen-cart is that once you understand the templating structure, writing plugins becomes pretty easy.

One of the features I enjoyed using with osCommerce, was a plugin for creating a related products box below a displayed. The plugin was easily implemented, and used an extra field add to the database. That was a great asset, that I felt missed using. Zen-cart offers something very similar in its port of XSell (Cross Sell). This feature would work fine if you are adding a few products at time, and do not have many related products. However, in my case, I have about 4,000 items in my catalog. The products are mostly lighting fixtures, which for must companies have coordinating fixtures for each room. This would be a bit cumbersome to create all of the related items. This is why I decided to write a quick plugin to get this simple functionality back. Continue reading Zencart Related Products

Mozilla recently had Thunderbird 3 Release Candidate 2 available for download. I was interested in trying out the new version. I upgraded my XP machine from version 2 to the Release Candidate version. Upgrade completed successfully. I opened up Thunderbird, and all of my emails were imported fine after the upgrade, and the program proceeded to index all of my emails.

I thought I would test out some the new features being touted in the new release. To my frustration, the new search feature would never complete. I would start typing in a search phrase, and then click on one of the terms suggested to me by sqlite. Thundbird opened a new tabbed, and the interface just showed my search criteria at the top with a dialog in the middle reading “Searching…”. The first couple of tries, I thought there was no matching criteria because Thunderbird’s search seemed to never complete. Continue reading Thunderbird 3 Search Not Working