OSCMax templating system

[laluna]

Open any template file in Dreamweaver and what do you get? A table with a few bits of PHP code dotted about. I thought the idea behind templates was to seperate the look of a site from the logic.

Give any graphic designer an oscmax template to work on and they won't know where to start. All they get is lots of tep_this and tep_that.

I'd like to see a solid ecommerce application that has a reliable ecommerce engine based on PHP and Mysql and a template system that allows editing in WYSIWYG html editors like dreamweaver.

Anyone know of such an application or anyone keen to collaborate on creating one, please send me a message.

[michael_s]

If you give a web designer an html page they won't know what to do? Sounds like a pretty unskilled designer to me.

The templates are all straight html with nested php tags. It cannot get any more basic than that. If you have a web designer that doesn't know how to deal with html pages with nested php elements, get a new web designer.

Without the nested php tags, you lose the dynamic parts of osCMax and simply have a static html page.

I have absolutely no problem editing the templates in dreamweaver wysiwyg or code view. The php elements are displayed as element tags and are easy to move around by dragging and dropping. Its so easy, a caveman could do it...

[laluna]

I can't sack the web designer because the web designer is me! I admit I am not an expert at web design but I do have a handful of 'not bad' sites under my belt.

I had just come home from work when I made the previous post. We run a site for property owners to find building tradesmen for their home improvement projects. We have added a shop that will sell home furnishings etc to raise some revenue (www.tradesmen-recommended.co.uk/catalog). I have set up an oscMax shop with the default osC template. My collegue showed me a good looking shop selling similar stuff and asked if we could make our site look as impressive as this one (www.rucomfy.co.uk). I said maybe but the site you're looking at probably cost a few thousand pounds and we got ours for free! I arrived home and looked into the possibility of creating my own template for our shop.

I would like to be able to create a mockup of the site in Fireworks and translate this into an osMax template. I opened main_page.tpl.php and it gives you no idea how the page will look when opened with live data. All images are included with tep_image() and therefore only appear as PHP blocks in Dreamweaver. It would be nice to be able to edit the template while seeing pretty how it will look but without the live data.

Each template for a site will have it's own set of images but the template directory does not contain an images directory. Where are the images for a template stored?

[jb_gmd]

The best and fastest way to make your site look different is to change the CSS code that is in your template directory. The other things you can do is either make new images to replace the stock OSC ones. Once you need to modify something that uses functions in the oscmax code its really easy to figure out. I'm not a web guru but I learned how the whole thing works without being a genius at php in about 3 hours. One helpful tip. If you're looking for where a function comes from you can use an editor like anyedit which has a feature where you can search through files for that function name or line of code. Hope this helps.