This is somewhat old news, but it seems people are still bitten by this problem. In some cases, osCommerce MS2 outputs SELECT queries with a negative LIMIT, eg:

More and more servers come with MySQL 4.1. Unfortunately, LIMIT no longer accepts negative arguments and you get this strange message:

1064 - You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '-20, 20' at line 1

The problem

osCommerce stores the static text (ie not the products description) in PHP files. The files are located in the includes/languages directory; the main file is <language>.php, page files are in subdirectory <language>/<page_name>.php.

Advantages include fast loading and the possible inclusion of logic (actually, only index.php does this).

But it also makes it more difficult for translators. Of course the translated text must respect the PHP syntax! In practice, you have to add a backslash \ before single quotes. You get lots of single quotes in French.

Another practical difficulty is that the language files are deep in the code structure. This offers one more way to non-technically oriented users to mess things up. And they would rather spend time selling stuff, not wading in PHP.

I've set up a site to experiment with various layouts: MS3 layouts here.

Well, layouts is somewhat audacious, as there is but one today... But there will be more! I will analyze the comments on my osCommerce blog entry and add layouts. The requirements and a few comments are included in the page. I won't repeat them here.

Fell free to download the HTML and CSS — If you want to submit a CSS that uses the current markup, mail it to me; if you require a different markup, mail both HTML and CSS, I will upload them and report here. Please don't post entire files in the comments, as it makes very hard reading.

Please note the HTML and CSS validate. I would like to keep it that way.

Note to self: check with Harald if we're not using XHTML instead.

The MS3 default template will use a CSS based layout. I will not go over advantages and disadvantages of CSS vs. tables, this has been amply debated over the years. Let's say CSS Zen Garden is testimony to the versatility of CSS2 layouts.

We have also decided the contents of the page should come first in the HTML:

• It will definitely improve accessibility. See for example Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, checkpoint 5.3
• It might lead to better positioning in search engines.

Also we're not using javascript for positioning.

This function will return the content type of the cart, usually for shipping purposes. It can be 'physical', 'virtual' or 'mixed' (some physical and some virtual products).

Here is a drop-in replacement for get_content_type() in class shopping_cart.php. In my opinion, functions longer than one screen (that's 50 lines for me) need to be rewritten, so I did (a long time ago). And, no, there's no point in upgrading. The logic is easy to understand if you're familiar with the ternary operator.

How do we know if a product is virtual? We check if there's a downloadable file. Admittedly somewhat restrictive, you can't download gift certificates but they would probably qualify as virtual for shipping purposes.

For osCommerce Hackers: The point of having the download file at the attributes level is to allow for a non downloadable (eg box) version.