Issue #4: April 10, 2002

By Harald Ponce de Leon

April 10, 2002

echo 'Hello World!';
CVS: New Order Class And Order Total Modules
CVS: Performance Increase
CVS: Cache Writing Directory
Apache 2
Weekly Summary Reports Updates

echo 'Hello World!';

It's a boy!

Those were the words Katja and Jan Wildeboer heard on Monday the 8th of April, as their baby boy Julius arrived. Congratulations go to the already proud parents who have a daughter!

To quote Mark Evans:

Congratulations :-)

How much did the shipping cost and did that include prices with tax??? :-))

CVS: New Order Class And Order Total Modules

A new order class has been implemented in CVS which takes care of retrieving the data for a specific order made, or for an order in progress.

An addition to the class are new order_total modules which take care of the order total display. These modules are displayed in the specified sort order and display the SubTotal, Shipping, Tax, and Total order information.

This allows for specific logic to be implemented into each module that meets your stores requirements. Logic implemented include free shipping on orders over $50.00 (not enabled by default), assigning a tax class to the shipping fee, and displaying different tax rates as one value or in tax groups.

These modules introduce new flexibility into osCommerce as new modules can be added. One important issue that has been solved is to display the order total information to an order the same way the order was made, which stays independent from the modules. A new orders_total database table was created which holds this information.

These implementations are still a work in progress and is recommended to not use a snapshot release for your live store.

CVS: Performance Increase

To quote David Garcia Watkins:

Theres been a slight change in the way the best-sellers box is built.
Instead of scanning the whole orders table, we now have a counter in the
products table named products_ordered.

I have commited a script to the extras folder in CVS for those of you that
like to keep up with CVS. This will take care of the database update for
you.

CVS: Cache Writing Directory

The writing directory of the cache files can be set via the Administration Tool. This however did not go in affect as there was a DIR_FS_CACHE parameter in the configure.php file.

This was reported as a bug and has been fixed.

Apache 2

Issue 82 of Zend's PHP Weekly Summary contained news of the progress of PHP for Apache 2:

One of the big announcements of the software world this week is that the Apache web server version 2.0.35 has now been marked as safe for production use. This brought the inevitable flood of PHP end-users trying to compile with the new Apache and not getting very far. There have been a number of different issues, but as we go to “press” it appears that most – if not all – have been resolved. Testing a snapshot couldn’t hurt, and support will very likely be there in 4.2.0 when it is released in a few weeks.

Issue 82 can be read online at:

https://www.zend.com/zend/week/week82.php

Weekly Summary Reports Updates

There has been no weekly summary report for the past few weeks as there was nothing to report. That does not mean that nothing was done :) A lot of time was needed for the order class and order_total modules work.

The Weekly Summary Reports will soon be moved away from the front page news and news columns to a section of its own in the Community area.