osCommerce MS-2.2 API Documentation

osCommerce MS-2.2 API Documentation is published and maintained by Carine who is a very active and helpful support forum member. She has published several well coded contributions and is also a community sponsor. The osCommerce API documentation is generated by phpDocumentor which does a nice job of creating a cross-referenced structure. The only shortcoming is that it creates the documentation based on comments in the scripts...which are hardly not present in the stock code. I wish Carine the best of luck developing this resource as it will serve many novice osCommerce coders well!

Ultimate SEO URLs v3.0 Features

Ultimate SEO URLs v3.0 Development was posted today as an open call to the community to offer their feedback as to requested features of the next generation of SEO URLs. It is so much easier to add features while in development than to add then later in maintenance releases. Planned development for v3.0 series:

• Abstract the code
• Integration of automatic 301 redirect script
• Introduce more cache features
• More scalable code
• Better regex for HTML characters
• Ability to choose URL keywords
• Improved install/un-install script for database settings

Ultimate SEO URLs - by Chemo [support thread]

Ultimate SEO URLs - by Chemo contribution has been released since mid January 2005 and already up to 50 pages of support! Most people don't realize the amount of work it takes to create, release, support, and maintain a good contribution...epecially one as active and popular as Ultimate SEO URLs. I've invested huge amounts of time on this contribution in particular since it is an area that the osCommerce application is lacking. The traditional SEF option merely creates an atificial directory structure that will put the product pages 6 or 7 levels deep! The farther away from the domain root the less relevancy of that page (or so the theory goes). Creating contributions is a thankless job. I've released more than I can count and have received countless "this is broken" or "your code broke my site" nasty-o-gram emails and only 4 genuine and heartfelt THANK YOU's. Nobody releases a contribution to get rich or even make enough money from donations to buy a cup of coffee...however, we sure as hell don't do it to get the negative feedback either. However, as of late there have been a few store owners posting very positive feedback on how the contribution affected their traffic. It is very satisfying to read these as it reminds me of why I support the osCommerce community -> helping store owners. So, the next question is what to do with the contribution in terms of future development? The code is mature and production ready in it's current state. I have even offered an automatic redirect script that sends 301 headers for old URLs to new URLs thereby preserving the established page seniorities. It is feature rich, easy to install, and very functional. Can I improve it? I would like to create a base class for the code instead of embedding it into the tep_href_link() function. This will make for easier upgrades and offer a level of abstraction. Both of these are important since 95% of store owners think PHP reads like Latin. By creating a class that can easily be upgraded by simply overwriting the file I will surely eliminate the extra support from those that error in cut-n-paste directions. The main benefit is that once abstacted it can be used on the admin side for scripts that create URLs for datafeeds (Froogle, etc). There have been a lot of store owners report postiive benefits from the contribution on the catalog side but their data feed URLs still use old parameter driven ones.