Importing and displaying external RSS feeds on your site is a great way to share your online activity with your visitors. If you are active on Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, or Tumblr, your visitors will enjoy staying current with your updates. Many social media sites provide exclusive feeds for user-generated content that may be imported and displayed on virtually any web page. In this article, you will learn three ways to import and display feed content on your WordPress-powered website — without installing yet another plugin.

What is magpie?
MagpieRSS is an XML-based (expat) RSS parser in PHP. WordPress uses Magpie to parse RSS and Atom feeds and display them on your website. Magpie parses feeds for two different WordPress functions.

• wp_rss() – fetches and parses feeds for instant
• fetch_rss() – fetches and parses feeds for advanced

Ref Site: Readmore

Share this post

I have done this for a few clients. Though they have all come up with different issues, the solutions seems to be the same.
“When I take too long to edit the product, I get logged out.”
“If I leave the admin for a few minutes, I need to redo anything I was doing the last time. The system just says to me to login and all changes are lost.”

The Solution:
Find the following file:
if (!$SESS_LIFE = get_cfg_var(‘session.gc_maxlifetime’)) {
$SESS_LIFE = 1440;
}

Replace it with:
/*
if (!$SESS_LIFE = get_cfg_var(‘session.gc_maxlifetime’)) {
$SESS_LIFE = 1440;
}
*/
$SESS_LIFE = 86400;

The code may vary a bit depending on the version you might be using. But that should keep the admin session alive for 86400 ( 24 hrs x 60 minutes x 60 seconds = 86400 seconds ) seconds i.e, a Day.

The same solution can be applied to Zen cart and CRE Loaded ( or any other derivative/clone of oscommerce ). Feel free to contact us in case you need any help.

Cheers,
Shiva

The Article is an interesting read on PCI and its compliance issues with open source softwares.. specifically oscommerce. you can view the articlehere.

Request:

Hi,

Im looking at using oscommerce as a starting point for a potential new project. They do not want to sell products but they do want to let people order samples of products. If we set the products value to zero can the payment process part of the website be skipped / removed?

Solution:

Modify the payment page to check for and set a default payment type. redirect to the checkout confirmation page.

Free shipping to products has been one of most common promotion method used on online stores.

I have been seeing a lot man of these days in the past week./. so I thought I will post in some of the deciding factors

1. Minimum Order Amount
“Free shipping over 100$”
always compute the relative profit you would be making by making the shipping free and make sureyou would be able to make up for the products price ( at the least ) when offering free shipping.

2. Number of products offered

Free shipping could be selectively offered to just a few products. Depending on the number of products you offer free shipping for, decide on the database changes. If you are offering the shipping module for a number of products, then you would probably go for a per products setting. If you offering only for a handful of products, better go for a single configuration base settings. ( Also,this helps in slightly improving on the store performance ).

3. Free Shipping Coupons
“for Free ground shipping use FREESHIP”

Some stores even provide coupons so that the free shipping facility is available at checkout. In this case, always make sure that you give a option among shipping options for free shipping. Also, make sure that the terms and conditions clearly dictate the free shipping terms ( like method/mode of shipping, shipping service like UPS or USPS generally used with the free ship service).

4. Terms and conditions
Like in all other cases, terms and conditions play an important role in deciding on the store performance in the market. Always update the Free shipping modules terms and conditions, so that there is always a page for the customer to look to when he has to approach for a free shipping option.

I have listed just a few of the many variations possible.. If you think there is something , I forgot mention please put in a comment, so that it helps someone reading this post .

Now back to work..
Cheers
Shiva

This is following the post I had done earlier on the skipping of payment page. I decided to put in the actual context of the problem and the solution to it..

1. The seller wants to give away samples to his customers.
2. He may or may not charge the customer for shipping. This actually depends on the customer’s choice of shipping options.
3. Let us assume that the free shipping is available ( since free sample itself is available and the seller is keen in promoting the product )

Under such circumstances, it is ideal to skip the payment page altogether. However, since it a promotion it may still require a billing address for accounting purposes.

We must also consider that all shopping cart systems require a payment method to be selected so we can work around that using a dummy payment option which is assigned by default..

You can check out the demo here. It works well for Oscommerce, Zen Cart, CRE Loaded and Osc max. The same mod can be developed for other cart systems too ( just let us know ).

Please write back if you think it was useful. Feel free to write at us support@e-cart-solutions in case, you need a similar mod or a modified/advanced one.

Cheers
Shiva

The cubecart team today quoted in their forums about a possible SQl injection possible in Cubecart versions 4.4 and lower. The vulnerability was found by the Core Security Team. The exact details can be found here.

The Cubecart Team has however, been very responsive top post a solution to this problem within in a few hours. The team had the following reply on the vulnerability alert ( Original Source: here )

”
CORE Security Advisories Team have found an SQL injection vulnerability in all current versions of CubeCart 4. The issue concerns a possible SQL injection vulnerability on the shipping method selection drop down box during the checkout process.

This will be patched in CubeCart 4.4.0 which will be released later today. Two fix methods are available below to patch any CubeCart v4 store for those who do not wish to upgrade to 4.4.0. ”

2 Solutions have been posted here:
A. File replace with the upgraded file.
B. Code Fix.
Solution A seems to the most simple one. However, just in case you have some mods done to the cart, you might want to go for solution B. Solution B works just fine in case you have other custom modifications done to the cart. If you have modified the code of the cart in anyway, you could simply apply the same fix ( as applicable ).

Feel free to contact us if you need any help with the fix. To avail the code check for free, mail us here.

Fatal error: Call to a member function add_current_page() on a non-object in /home/xx/xxx/includes/application_top.php on line 312

This is another of the common issues I encounter almost on every new instance I work on. Issue resolution is very simple. Following the steps as below:

1. open includes/application_top.php
2. find the section of code

// navigation history
  if (tep_session_is_registered('navigation')) {
        if (PHP_VERSION unserialize($broken_navigation);
        }
  } else {
        tep_session_register('navigation');
        $navigation = new navigationHistory;
  }
  $navigation->add_current_page();

3. Replace the section with the following segment of code:

  // navigation history
  if (tep_session_is_registered('navigation')) {
        if (PHP_VERSION unserialize($broken_navigation);
        } else {
          $navigation = new navigationHistory;
        }
  } else {
        tep_session_register('navigation');
        $navigation = new navigationHistory;
  }
  $navigation->add_current_page();

4. That should resolve the issue.. if not please send in a message, we can help you out.

Cheers,
Shiva

Paypal recently changed its requirements to mandate the IEC code.. the worse  new was that they were reverting all withdrawals back to the account, with the fee applied.. that would mean a great lot money lost in the reversal, conversion etc. It was great help for the past 2 years now.. but with such sudden changes things have become a lot more unreliable..

I just thought this might help someone.. I just moved in to a new place and had to install the xampp server.. but to my surprise it would not switch to php4. so I have to install my favorite script on php5. But then started getting messaged about the functions:
Deprecated: Function eregi() is deprecated in \home\xxx\xx\xxxx\admin\includes\classes\language.php on line 87
Deprecated: Function eregi() is deprecated in \home\xxx\xx\xxxx\includes\classes\language.php on line 87

I believe this is due to deprecated use of functions.. I just decided to check for all instances of deprecated functions.. you can find the package here. It costs you nothing.. but please post back if you see some issue.. I may be wrong at places ( or missed something out in a hurry ).

oscommerce-php4-to-php5 v0.1

I hope you enjoy it .
Cheers
Shiva