Adding telephone to "contact us" form

[monobenzone]

how do i start a new thread I NEED HELP HERE, how do i change the Contact us page, I want to include my telephone number and mailing address, PLEASE HELP ME!

[pgmarshall]

Make sure you use the Prefix when you post - so we know if you are using v2.0.25 or v2.5 ... without this information I can not answer your question.

So - which version are you using?

Regards,

[ridexbuilder]

how do i start a new thread I NEED HELP HERE... PLEASE HELP ME!

There's a strange button at the top of each section:
+ Post New Thread
And SHOUTING repeatedly doesn't help!

[mraeryceos]

monobenzone, I can tell you to RTFM, but, the manual is kind of scarce... there isn't much of it. Go to http://yoursite.com/admin or http://yoursite.com/catalog/admin, log in, and poke around there.

[ridexbuilder]

FYI: osCmax has the most documentation/information available to it than ANY other osCommerce-derived package. Sometimes a little effort is required! The constantly growing wiki is first port of call, along with searching on this forum. It's free open source software and guess what free support here. So to expect everything to be spoon-fed immediately is entirely unrealistic.
If some effort is made to read up on how osCmax (BTS) templating works, then this will go a long way to answering many questions. Create your own template and start looking to modify contact_us.tpl.php - it is not difficult.

[pgmarshall]

You never did answer my question about which version so I am going to assume v2.5 ...

Goto Admin -> Configuration -> Templates -> Contact Us Form -> Enable what you want or type text into the Store Opening Hours free format box.

Regards,

[met00]

Prior to 2.5 there is a manual that is for sale by someone (I can't remember who, but I was one of the reviewers). If 2.5 we are, as Ridex points out, providing tons more documentation than any other open source product in the WIKI. What we can't do is teach people to read or code.

"Adding telephone to "contact us" form" - is that the customers information? Is that your store information? Do you want to modify the BTS template to pick it up automagically from your database (the values stored in your store configuration) or do you just want a quick fix to hardcode it into a template? If you are doing it programatically from the database, do you want to allow the code to only display it when the customer is logged in, or at all times. Do you want to be able to manage the display of it so it can be controlled by the admin side on where the data is placed (in the body above the form, or below the form in a footer?). What fields from the database do you want to display? Phone? Fax? Address?

There are two kinds of users who opt for an open source store. The simple user who wants to do as little as possible in configuring a store and wants to "install and sell" as fast as possible, and then the more power user who wants to have tons of configuration options in the admin that they can tweak with to personalize the store to meet their needs. [okay, that's a rather simplified view of the world, there is a sliding scale and all I did was pick the two largest groups on it, at the low end is the guy who just wants to point a new domain at a server and be on-line selling, and at the other end are the people that end up joining the development team and want to tinker with the internals... but the two largest curves/bumps on the line are the ones I mentioned above]. The first kind of user is not going to bother reading any documentation, the second may be willing to do so, but once they read about BTS many times they get intimidated, which is why so much can be accomplished straight from admin configuration.

A more complex "contact us" page is very possible (beyond what is currently in the admin of 2.5). It would require modifying the current admin component (and the fallback template), it could allow for the creation of reason pulldowns as well as formatting and additional fields for the user, etc. As it is NOT pertinent to the sales process, it is a low priority. Should an industrious person go out and create this feature set and put it up as a mod, I'm sure it would be considered for the next generation release.

Final note about the WIKI. If you have come up with a process to do something, or have learned something useful while working in the product, you can post it here and ask any of the developers to help you clean up the item and add it to the WIKI. The more FAQs we have answered in the WIKI, the less we have to answer them here. Responding "did you look in the error log file, and what was the error message" every time someone says they get a white/blank page doesn't make us feel useful, just overworked and non-responsive. We would LOVE to have it so that the first place one goes when they have an issue is the WIKI, the second place is the forums. I'm working on a post for the WIKI right now on how to debug the cart using the messagestack. The key problem with getting people to use the WIKI is that most people are NOT used to having open source that is well documented. They are used to FIRST ask on the forum. It's why many open source development teams don't even bother with a WIKI, because it is about retraining the user community to go to the WIKI first...

Enough rant... once "how do i start a new thread I NEED HELP HERE, how do i change the Contact us page, I want to include my telephone number and mailing address, PLEASE HELP ME!" has clarified the request (which I suspect is that they want their store data on the content/contact_us.tpl.php) they will be able to follow Ridex's post, edit the file and hardcode in what they want where the want it.