As you know, last week I spent some time getting back to basics with osCommerce - after having been out of the loop for two years or more, it was an eye opener!

One of my long term clients runs an older osCommerce store - and wanted to give the site a makeover - I suggested moving onto the latest stable version of osCommerce, but as the site has many contributions and is actually playing quite nicely, we decided to keep the base files as they are.

In order to keep costs fairly low, my client had decided to buy a dedicatd osCommerce template from Template Monster.

I've never seen a template that is full of such poorly coded crap.  Admittedly it was only about $75 (around £35 or so) - but it is really, truly awful.

Whoever coded it has done their best, but has used a mixture of short open tags and normal PHP tags, divs and tables, graphics and text.  Heck, to make a heading, they've used a nested table instead of a simple H tag!

The whole header area is one large image over which the designer has used tables to position text and so on.  It's a complete nightmare.

As the budget for this job is really low, I decided to simply go with it, as is.  The client understands the problems with the design, and that it can (should) be done differently.

Anyway, the integration is going quite smoothly - what is taking the most time is getting the graphics all correct.  As we know, osCommerce is quite graphically heavy, and this template on top, well, it adds an extra layer of graphics and complexity.

But, it's going OK, asll things considered.  I reckon on another few hours work, and it'll be in a presentable fashion - I can upload it and let the customer make comments on any changes he wants.

Recommendation

Template Monster are great for simple HTML designs - watch out for the proprietary designs, as they will usually be coded by people without much experience of the program that they are designing for!

Instead, try one of the dedicated osCommerce Template providers such as www.oscommerce-templates.co.uk.