Getting Rid of the "OXID Gift Shop" from Title-Bar

If you are administering OXID based e-Commerce shops, you might be annoyed with the omni-present "OXID Gift Shop" in the title-bar of the web-browser.

You can change this in the /admin area of OXID under Master Settings > Core Settings > SEO (tab)

Product and Category Sorting for OXID

Sorting Categories

Use the Sorting text field in category-editing it is possible to setup a sort-index for categories, as seen in screenshot.

Sorting Products


Sorting products is not as straight-forward (though it should made so in future release of OXID).

If a Product belongs to a particular Category, go to the category listing, pull up the category-details, and click on the Sortig tab.  Click on Sort Categories, which will open a pop-up with two tables.  You can drag and drop the products from Current Sorting into New Sorting in the order you wish the products to sort in this particular category.

When done, do not forget to click on Save new sorting.  You can verify if the new sort-order saved on the front-end of your shop!

Currency Settings in OXID e-Shop

New-comers to OXID e-Shop may find the currency-settings a bit mysterious.  Even as of current version 4.2.0 it is relatively simple to setup in the /admin area.  Follow:

Master Settings > Core Settings > Settings > Other Settings

Look for a textarea with instructions which read as:

Add or remove Currencies. The format is:
[name]@[rate]@[decimal separator]@[thousand separator]@[symbol]@[decimal precision]

Setup all the currencies you desire using the format above (drop the square brackets [] and use @ as the separator).  Example:

EUR@1@,@.@€@2
CHF@1.35@,@.@CHF@2
GBP@0.87@,@.@£@2
USD@0.73@,@.@$@2

They appear on the front end as follows.

404 Not found oxseo.php

Short of bashing my head against the office wall upon being repeatedly confronted with a 404 Not Found error, I realized that I was using the wrong path for RewriteBase in .htaccess file.  The exact error was:

The requested URL /home/oxid/pubweb/4_2_0/oxseo.php was not found on this server.
Apache/2.2.9 (Debian) PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny4 with Suhosin-Patch Server at 192.168.253.129 Port 80

If anyone faces this on your OXID installations, this could be your fix, too.

We were using:
RewriteBase /home/oxid/pubweb/4_2_0/

Instead we should have been using:
RewriteBase /oxid/

.. where the target URL is http://192.168.253.129/oxid/ (being used to put together a Debian 5.0 Lenny Virtual Machine for OXID 4.2)

xtc2oxid - Migrating xt:commerce Shops to OXID

Itratos from Bamberg has done a great job with coming up with a Migration-Script for shops moving from xt:commerce shop software to OXID (currently version 4.2).

Command Line (CLI) and Web-based Script

Two variants of the script are available, each for a web-browser based invocation and a command-line (CLI) invocation.  We used CLI method.

console@host:~/xtc2oxidmodule$ php xtc2oxid_commandline.php &

Skip the & at the end of the command if you wish to see the live output on the console, else the command will run in the background.  For the first time you run the script, it isn't a bad idea to view the live output on the console.

Glitches

A few initial glitches had to be overcome, primarily because the PHP CLI binary on the migration machine was of PHP4, which rendered calls to native OXID classes unsuccessful.  Replacing the php4-cli package from our Debian 5.0 Lenny machine with php5-cli fixed the problem.  Remarks in this post pertain to the CLI-method.

Variables related to the migration environment, such as paths of the existing xt:commerce shop, the target OXID shop, database settings etc. are stored in a handy _config.php, placed in the same directory as the xtc2oxid_commandline.php script.

Types of Data Migrated

• Customer/Buyer data with all addresses
• Products, including pictures and variants
• Categories
• Manufacturers
• Orders
• Newsletter and newsletter-subscribers

User Data

User-data (shop buyers) is migrated as well.  However it is required that users are informed of new passwords, since the database storage encryption is different in xt:commerce and OXID (uses md5).

About euroblaze's OXID Migration Services

euroblaze provides migration-services for OXID Shops.  We migrate other shops systems (such as xt:commerce) to OXID e-Sales, or older versions of OXID (OXID-2, OXID-3, OXID Mietshop/SaaS), to  newer versions.

Google Chrome Living up to it's Promise

Back in 2008 when Google Chrome was announced many wondered why we need another web-browser.  As far as I could tell the only thing lacking in the predominant browser of the day, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer was the sheer size and bulk of them, and the RAM resources they consumed.

Perhaps the folks at Google have thought it well, that the ever increasing importance of Internet based applications called for a new era in browser-technology.  Their promise was to deliver a browser which is fast - in it's speed of running as an app on the host computer, and in it's speed of helping users to utilize the Internet fast, PLUS delivers all features that incumbent browsers offered.  Above all make it Open Source.

The speed part was clear from the first release itself.  Chrome was blazing fast to load pages and maximized web-page viewing space.  But with Google Chrome 4, in BETA at the time of this writing, Extensions and Bookmark management have been added.

Bookmark sync is indeed a 100% backup of your Chrome bookmarks into your Google Account and the restore is a 1-click process.  You can read up more or download the BETA and try it out.

Extensions expand the functionality of the browser.  For example I like to keep track of the PageRank for web-sites I visit.  A small Extension in this case, which installed in a single-click and, adds this functionality to the browser.  This particular PageRank Extension isn't offered by Google themselves, rather an independent programmer, but Google publishes several extensions themselves as well.

Save MySQL - Oracle, the fox in the henhouse?

For those us in the OXID community who are living the benefits of Commercial Open-Source software, The future of MySQL in Oracle's ownership could come as a particularly tricky issue, since there is direct competition between MySQL and the new owner's core product.

Under Sun's ownership, the danger was not as acute, since autonomous-Sun was an open-source affine company, and secondly had no other parallely competing products in their portfolito.

The future of MySQL is indeed at stake.  Please take a minute to voice your opinion at http://www.helpmysql.org and promote this question, so that it can be debated in the community as formidably as possible.