Archive for the ‘Webdesign’ Category

A project I have been working on for some months is now live, the Bluestone Online eshop. Bluestone are a top ebay seller and have been there for  some years with an enviable reputation for reliability, and now they have their own eshop stocking, memory cards for mobile phones, and cameras, console games, hard drives, usb devices, GPS, mobile phone accessories and travel items.

Bluestone online also stock Apple computer items, as well as ipod touch, nano, classic and shuffle and iphone items  and accessories.

For the road warrior there are a range of useful in car devices, 3G dongles chargers and adaptor cards and dongles.

Give Bluestone  Online  a visit at their new eshop at  http://www.bluestone-online.com.

Deleivery is very fast- I know ‘cos I have bought stuff and its very quick, but better still its free!

Pay Bluestone-online a visit for your digital lifestyle needs.

Introduction to HDSEO update tool

Users of the Clickcart Pro/ Eurocart Pro v7 eshop application by Kryptronic Inc have the option to buy a mod (Xmod) called HDSEO or High Definition Search Engine Optimisation.

The purpose of the Xmod is to generate user friendly readable links for your urls in your shop- turning some dynamically generated url string with lot sof parameters into something that would be instantly recogniseable as a product or category for the user – or more importantly for a search engine.

There is a half way house option as standard with the shop application that generates reasonably short and identifiable links, but they are not meaningfull to search engines. Hence this tool. Whether there is any value in readable links is open to debate but on balance its probably better to have than not.

The way the system is implemented in CCP/ECPv7 is not that straightforward in my opinion especially for the user who is not terribly web /computer literate and causes a lot of problems. Even for someone with a bit of knowledge its not easy and is very very time consuming.

HDSEO is a two stage process: first you need to write your rewrite rules in Mod-rewrite syntax into a .htaccess file. This then needs to be uploaded onto the webserver into the directory that hosts the eshop.

Second you need to then tell the application about these rewritten links by adding them into the database. When the xmod is purchased a new table is written in the shop database to accomodate these links. Every time you add new products or categories to your eshop you need to update these HDSEO links. This might involve locating and editing existing links inthe database and inthe .htaccess file.

Doing this manually is very time consuming and as I sussed out how to get this working for a client I decided also to write a script to automate the process, so when the catalogue was updated the HDSEO could also be updated too. I have gone beyond this and further optimised the code and the access to the script so that it runs as a reasonably user friendly tool.

When to use the tool

Everytime you add or remove products or categories to your eshop database this tool should be run. It only takes a few moments and will ensure all your links are up to date at all times.

What does the tool do

The tool examines the database of your eshop category and product items and creates user readable links out of your name fields.

1) Stage one generates the .htaccess data, and dumps it to screen where you can either cut and paste it straight into a file called .htaccess and load to your webserver, or optionally download as a text file called htaccess.txt. You then rename this file .htaccess and load onto your webserver.

2) Stage two generates generates the MySQL commands needed to first of all delete all your old HDSEO data and then replace it with new data matching your .htaccess. You can dump the commands to screen for manual input into your database via a database admin tool like Navicat or PHPMyAdmin, or optionally you can have the tool do the updates for you – it takes a matter of seconds.

Limitations

The tool has limitations and you should be aware of them. If you beleive you would be affected by them then do not use the tool. You may wish to consider restructuring your database data before using this tool in view of the limitations.

• Unique data: It relies on your category and product name data being unique in your database. If you have identically names products or categories and products with the same names the script output will generate links with the same names. This will cause you problems as the server will use the first found item inthe .htaccess when you click on an affected link.

Structuring your data with unique names will sort this. For example: having a category called Sony TV’s and then giving each TV a name like Sony Bravia 40, Sony Bravia 48 will be far more effective than having a category called Sony TV and a product called Sony TV.

The default queries this tool uses can be adapted by you with only limited knowledge of MySQL syntax so if you know you have duplicates but still want the convenience of using this tool, you may be able to apply some filters to the sql to achieve this. Using a DISTINCT Select query will achieve this but may be too coarse an option unless you understand how this functions.

• Spaces: Spaces should not be used on urls either in files or in links. yes urlencoded spaces can be used but they are not efficient for SEO purposes. The tool allows you to substitute spaces for either the underscore, the dash or no space at all. Ensure your database and .htaccess file match in this regard!

• Eshops not in the root of a webserver/domain. The script has not been fully tested in  a non root environment- as I don’t have a shop in this configuration to try it on. If yours is, it should be OK but you are advised to proceed with caution initially. Anyone using the script like this would be asked toreport back her ein case there ar echanges I can make to cope with this if there are unforseen issues.

• Security: This tool is not integrated directly in CCP/ECP v7. It does however require access to the shop database. It does this using settings you provide to the connection script in the htaccessory.php file. When you extract the contents of this tool, they will be in a directory called “tools”. Upload this entire directory to your webserver. You should now secure this directory using an .htaccess file for this directory. Your isp/hosting provider will normally provide you with a tool in your control panel which allows you to password protect any chosen directory. You MUST do this or your HDSEO will be subject to compromise by anyone who learns of its location. You can if you so desire rename the directory from tools to anything you like. This .htaccess file is not related to the one used by  the eshop which will be located one level above the tools directory in the the file structure.

If you are especially paranoid, consider loading the tool onto and off the server whenever you need it. Your choice.

• Setting up: Once the files are securely located on your webserver you will need to edit the htaccessory.php file to contain your database connection data. Without this the script will not function. Details are included in the file. You should use a suitable text editor to achieve this. Take care opening thse files in Dreamweaver as it has a nasty habit with changing some form parameters without telling you due to the Spry /javascript used within.
• Use of these tools: The use of these tools is entirely up to you. They were developed for use in my own development work but I have decided to make them available as a service to the CCP/ECP v7 userbase as HDSEO seems to be a major bugbear for user problems. if you already have HDSEO set up and intend to use this tool going forward, MAKE BACKUPS OF BOTH YOUR HDSEO TABLE IN YOUR DATABASE, AND YOUR CURRENT .htaccess FILE.. Being able to get your shop back working if you break your links with this tool is entirely your responsibility. These scripts work perfectly in my hosting environment, they may not in yours!
• The tools come with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY INFERRED OR IMPLIED, consider this before you download the tool, download infers acceptance of this fact. I will provide support to users of the tool when I can, I am not available 24 hours a day and have other tasks to undertake.
• You are free to modify the tool as you see fit, if you do please ensure you keep the existing credits in place and notify this website of your improvements. The code is released under a GPL you may adapt or modify as you see fit but it is not for resale.

Installation

Installation is easy with basic web knowledge:

1. Extract the files to your hard drive, maintining the directory structure
2. Upload the files in their directory structure to the same directory as is used by your eshop
3. Password protect this directory using an .htaccess file
4. download the htaccessory file to your drive, open in a text editor and insert your database connection parameters where specified near the top of the file
5. If necessary you may wish to fine tune the SQL used to access your category and products data. Once done, save the file and upload to the server again
6. Server Requirements: Should be OK in any php5.x environment but has only been developed on php v5.2 so thats all I am willing to state. Feel free to try it elsewhere though
7. Your php installation must be set up with mysqli support (no longer a default option). Most New ECP/CCPv7 installations I would expect to be running mysqli.
8. You DO NOT have to run this on the server your shop inhabits. In fact you do not need a shop installation on your test server either!. If you have a copy of WAMP or Linux running a webserver locally with php v5.2 you can copy over the database tables from your shop (the ecom_cat and ecom_prod are the two main ones- the cms one is optional really). The script can be run on this database and then the output loaded to your live environment. Auto database updating might not be possible in this configuration so you may need to enter the database data via phpMyAdmin or similar.

Using the tool

Do this at a quiet time for your eshop

1. Back up your existing .htaccess file for your eshop HDSEO if any and also your database HDSEO data, so you can restore to where you came from  if this all goes wrong.
2. Access the tool by going to http://<type your domain>/tools/menu.php
3. Follow the link to the HDSEO tool.
4. Edit the parameters on the .htacccess configuration tab
5. Edit in any custom rules that you use in your existing .htaccess file
6. Choose to either display on screen (default) or download the output as a text file- first time recommended to dump to screen
7. In your browser, select all the screen contents and copy to a new .htaccess file on your hard drive. If you chose to download a file instead the file will be called htaccess.txt. Rename this to .htaccess and upload directly to your server.
8. Upload this file to the directory containing your eshop, overwrite the old one if necessary.
9. Click the back button in your browser and return to the .htaccess configuration screen.
10. Select the database configuration screen. Fill in the details required ensuring the space character matches the one you chose before.
11. The first time you run this its recommended you dump to screen and copy the data again this time applying it via a database admin tool like phpmyadmin ( hosting providers usually provide such a tool for direct database management) Note. the first command is a truncate statement- this erases all the existing data in your HDSEO table- YOU MUST remove all old data or your results will be poor at best.
12. Once you are confident of whats going on select the database update option and the tool will do all database changes automatically

I hope you find this tool useful. Please feel free to post any comments you have here, I will be happy to answer any queries when I can.

Release data:

Initial release:

v1.5
v1.5.1 (minor additions to illegal characters array that were dropped off in release build)
v1.5.2 (removed inproper access message which showed in form when loading accessory script )

Latest version:v1.5.3 : IMPORTANT CORRECTION: Corrected a small but significant error with .htaccess file creation which potentially could stop your server from loading. Ensure you upgrade to the v1.5.3 version.

tools.zip