Go Web Young Man

Thanks for the great tutorial! Just what I needed.

Mike,
You are correct. My tutorial no longer requires a language file.

After I tracked down the errors everyone was experiencing, I realized that all these errors could be solved by removing the standard language file requirement that was found on line 15 of blog.php.

This made sense because blog.php doesn’t require any constants from a language file. Instead, I use WordPress functions to generate such variables as the page title. Therefore, language portability issues for this file will be handled in WordPress itself.

Mike,
In theory, you are correct. For example, in my demonstration of this technique, I am running OSC and Wordpress off of the same database.

Basically, when you edit the path mentioned in step 3 above, you are simply telling OSC where to find the WordPress file that is required to embed the blog. On the WordPress side of things, you would need to make sure that it is configured correctly to do what you are asking.

In the case you mention, you would need to make sure that your Blog Address URI is set correctly as explained in step 2, and you would use the same database by specifying the same credentials in wp-config.php under your WordPress root folder.

thanks for your tutorial!!!
i have one problem: the first page of my blog is integrated with my oscommerce installation, but if i click on a link, i get the normal wordpress layout for that page. What did i do wrong?

Aaron,
You pointed out something that I wasn’t aware of. However, after looking into the issue of the shopping cart dropping items whenever a user clicks on a blog article, I realized that this is because the permalinks to the blog do not include the OSC Session ID.

Therefore, I went in and added the query string “?osCsid=OSC-SESSION-ID” to all the article permalinks. In addition, I added this to the links that appear in the OSC breadcrumbs.

That addition covers most instances of the links in this integration; however, the side column links in the blog and any inline site links in blog articles do not include this variable. Therefore, I plan to write a Wordpress plugin that will append this variable to all URLs processed by Wordpress.

In the meantime, I have updated the ZIP files associated with this tutorial to include the OSC Session ID in all blog permalinks and OSC bread crumb links.

Great tutorial. Thanks.

I have successfully followed your instructions, and almost everything is working properly.

However, I seem to be having an issue with my images.

From blog.php, the images show up just fine (images/m07.jpg, etc.)…….but if I follow a link to any of the links on my blog’s “home” page none of the images show up (mysite.com/blog.php/?m=20061118).

Any ideas why this could be happening? How can I fix it? Thanks.

Aaron,
In regards to the shopping cart emptying when a user clicks on a link in the blog, I realized there is a better solution than what I have already discussed. Do this:

In the OSC Admin, go to Configuration > Sessions and set “Force Cookie Use” to true. This solves the problem without having to add the OSC Session ID to the URL (furthermore, from a security standpoint, this is the preferred solution).

Does this works with the CRELoaded ? That would definitely rock if your solution can work with CRELoaded, anyone has tested this out ?

Thanks.

Thank you for the information, I’ll give it a try today and will see if it works out properly.

Thanks for your help.

David,
Sorry I haven’t had time to answer your question. If I don’t find time tomorrow, I will look into it next week.

Rano,
I would imagine that what you’re proposing would require someone to code an additional contribution/plugin for either OSC or WordPress.

I had a problem with the edit of the application_top.php file. After following Michael’s instructions, it was not sending Credit card information through properly, when I reverted to the former ‘application_top.php’ file, everything worked okay…

Can I get some help in making sure that I edited that file properly?

Michael,
Thanks for your work on integrating WordPress with OSC! I’ve been working on getting this set up over the past few days and appear to have most of my glitches worked out, with a few notable exceptions. First, the Page, Category, and Archive links in the side column open to blank pages (there’s probably an error message, but I’m not seeing it in IE). In addition,
the RSS and Comments RSS links appear somewhat squirrelly as well—they both generate a “page not found” screen with an url starting with feed:http://….is that just so someone can copy the url into their feed reader, and actually working properly? Finally, I’m not following Alistair MacNeil’s post about getting Ultimate SEO Urls working with this by putting blog.php into /blog/index.php. Did he paste the code from blog.php into index.php? If you can shed any light on that it would be greatly appreciated as well. My blog page is at http://laurelcoveoutfitters.com/catalog/blog.php and I installed the latest WordPress version 2.1.1. Thanks again!

ow, and I forgot to mention to integrate the wordpress search into oscommece since the osc search very bad and does only search products. Can somebody please help me with this?

Thanks,

Mark,
What value do you have in the Wordpress Admin under:
Options > General > Blog address (URI)

Shilo,

Just to confirm, when you refer to having planned to use “WP Shopping Cart Gold”, is this a for pay version of WP e-Commerce Lite available at Instinct Entertainment: http://www.instinct.co.nz/?p=16 ? If your answer is no, then their shopping cart may be of interest to you as it is a Wordpress plugin and I believe that the sample installs that they link to show some promise.

However, if the plugin that I link to above is the “lite” version of the exact plugin that is giving you problems then here is a quick overview* of what I would change in order for this tutorial to work with your install:

1. Install OSC inside your Wordpress root folder** (If you are extracting the OSC archive on your server, then it will be inside a folder. You will need to use your FTP program to move those files from inside that folder to your Wordpress root folder.)
2. Adjust the path settings in step 2 to match your install.
3. Adjust the path for the Wordpress embed in step 3 to: require(’./wp-blog-header.php’);

*Keep in mind, this is a quick overview. I haven’t actually attempted what you are proposing (i.e. installing WP and OSC in the same directory). While it is certainly possible to do this, I can’t guarantee that you won’t run into a headache or two.

**PLEASE NOTE: Installing WP and OSC into the same folder will result in a lot of files co-mingling together. Upgrades or modifications to either your WP or OSC files could potentially be confusing.

Item 3 that references the previous item 3 gives me the following error:

Warning: require(./wp-blog-header.php) [function.require]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/turnerte/public_html/mytelecomguru/oscommerce/includes/application_top.php on line 15

Fatal error: require() [function.require]: Failed opening required ‘./wp-blog-header.php’ (include_path=’.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php’) in /home/turnerte/public_html/mytelecomguru/oscommerce/includes/application_top.php on line 15

I’m not a php programmer, sorry, but the path needs to move up one. Basically, require(’./url/wp-blog-header.php’). But that doesn’t work either.

Thanks,
Shilo

Shilo,
To move up one directory use “../” (“./” = the current directory).

Stella,
I’ve seen the error you are talking about. I haven’t spent much time looking into it; however, the existence of that error varies among webhosts (e.g. my web server doesn’t have that problem). Therefore, I suspect that it is related to an Apache configuration. Furthermore, your suggestion to adjust the permalink structure is a good suggestion in regards to fixing this issue and SEO as well.

Hi ive just installed wordpress into my os and i worked fine after i put the wordpress table in to the os db.

Ive there is now a problem with currency.

After this

define(’WP_USE_THEMES’, false);
require(’./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php’);

My

The address that I am using in the Blog address is: http://www.yarian.com/catalog/blog.php

Michael,

Edit worked perfectly. Took me a few minutes to find, but I got it.

I want to say thank you for this. I was just about to start trying to hack out something like this myself when I figured I’d give Google a try and came across this page. You saved me hours, probably more.

And one question… Has anyone figured out how to redirect from the /blog/ folder back to blog.php just in case a visitor gets froggy and goes to the /blog/ folder instead of clicking where they’re supposed to? I’m pretty sure it could be done with an .htaccess rule but figure somebody else may have already solved the problem.

Great code. Have you added a post to the osc forum? I’m having that SEO problem as well, if I add the code :

// turn off WordPress themes and include the WordPress core:
define(’WP_USE_THEMES’, false);
require(’./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php’);

the site will sometimes generate a 404 error, if i take this code out the site works perfectly again but the blog is of course not viewable.

I am working on changing the path to catalog/blog/blog.php and adding the includes folder ( catalog/blog/includes ) so blog.php has its own application_top.php. It seems to have worked but isn’t ideal.

Any ideas on how to get around the seo problem? is there a way to have a second application top file for wordpress in the root directory rather than in a seperate directory as i have done? cheers.

Thanks for this tutorial. I followed the steps above but when i view blog.php i get this error:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare tep_show_category() (previously declared in /-path-to-my-install-/includes/header.php:154) in /-path-to-my-install-/includes/boxes/categories.php on line 13

Any help would be much appreciated.

iain, it seems that if you change UTF-8 by ISO-8859-1 in your wordpress admin panel (Options/reading) you can resolve the problem with the characters. I test it and works.

Michael, thank you very much for your work!

Note: sorry about my very poor english…

I love the direction this is going, but I’m having a couple problems. Could you help me figure out how to get my sidebar to work work correctly? Also, my comments are not visible, they are posting but they aren’t showing up on my blog page… any ideas?

Hopefully you can help me, thanks!

Your Demo isn’t working!!! I’d like to see how the wordpress integration looks like!
http://osc-wordpress.wh-demo.com/

Hi, I did the install, but when I finished I got this error on blog.php

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: get_bloginfo() in /home/northcen/public_html/blog.php on line 14

??

everything is working, but when i update index.php with the one you provide, the last 4 blog headlines doesn’t display.

It’s empty… any idea how to fix that?

When I follow these instructions, the admin pages lose the css. I’d like it to retain it, since a non-css version is ugly and difficult to navigate. Did I miss something somewhere?

Great contribution Michael. Thanks for sharing!

I had a problem though.
Because I was using OsCommerce STS template system, and Header Tags SEO contributions. The meta tags were all the same for all blog pages.

I have came up with a solution. Just add the code in the STS template file’s headers:

<?php
if (preg_match("/(.*)blog.php(.*)/", $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])) {
	echo “<title>”;
	wp_title(”);
	if(wp_title(”, false)) { echo ‘ :’; }
	bloginfo(’name’);
	echo “</title>”;
	wp_head();
	wp_get_archives(’type=monthly&format=link’);
	echo ‘<link rel=”pingback” href=”‘ .get_bloginfo(’pingback_url’). ‘” />’;
	echo ‘<base href=”http://www.YOURSITE.com” />’;
} else {
	echo ‘<!--’ .$headcontent. ‘-->’;
}
?>

Basically this adds one header for the blog pages and the standard header for all other pages.

I hope this helps someone.

Cheers

Thanks for this plug-in Michael! I just did an integration found here: http://www.calsk8.com/skateshop/

Regarding the 404 errors and SEO problems… I ran into those as well. We run Ultimate SEO. Simple solution: turn off permalinks in wordpress. It appears that having mod-rewrite on both Oscommerce links and Wordpress links doesn’t work out well. No idea why that is.

I put two dynamic sidebars within oscommerce boxes. We wanted the blog and pages accessible from everywhere. This eliminates a second “blog” sidebar (as your demo has).
In “column_right.php” i put:
require(DIR_WS_BOXES . ‘blog_sidebar.php’);

I created a “blog_sidebar.php” in includes/boxes/. I put the stuff below… your milage may vary. This worked… our oscommerce design is not highly modified so it should look fairly good for you:

<?php
/* Blog Sidebar by Paul Ireland for Cal Skate Skateboards (http://www.calsk8.com/) 6/26/2008 */
?>
<!-- blog sidebar //-->
<tr><td>
<?php
  $info_box_contents = array();
  $info_box_contents[] = array(’text’ => “Blog Stuff”);

  new infoBoxHeading($info_box_contents, false, false);
?>
<table border=”0″ width=”100%” cellspacing=”0″ cellpadding=”1″ class=”infoBox”>
  <tr><td><table border=”0″ width=”100%” cellspacing=”0″ cellpadding=”3″ class=”infoBoxContents”>
  <tr><td><img src=”images/pixel_trans.gif” width=”100%” height=”1″ border=”0″ alt=”  “></td></tr>
  <tr><td align=”left” class=”boxText”><div id=”blog_sidebar”><ul><?php  dynamic_sidebar(’Main Sidebar’); ?></ul></div></td>
  </tr><tr><td><img src=”images/pixel_trans.gif” width=”100%” height=”1″ border=”0″ alt=”  “></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td></tr></td></tr>
<!-- blog_sidebar_eof //-->