STS 4.5.8

STS 4

Contribution from Chris Buchi "Rigadin2"; and Bill Kellum "bkellum" (of Sounds Good Productions)- great OSC community members
Latest version: STS version 4.5.8
Download URL: www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,1524
Price: Free
Suitable for: OSC 2.2 MS2, OSC RC1, OSC RC2 (and RC2a)
Documentation (by Bill Kellum): available together with download (.doc format). I have also made a copy of the STS v4.5.8 User Manual (in .pdf format; approximately 273 kb. This is Bill Kellum's documentation but I just made it into .pdf format as it is safer for internet downloads).

STS 4 - what does it do?

Preamble

This is a short tutorial is specifically about the OSC contribution STS v4.5.8 (although I will interchangeably refer to it here as STS 4 or just STS). Most of this information is gleaned from the documentation done by Bill Kellum (comes with the download). I have put this into a more graphical form and am only covering the very basics. I have had an earlier but similar version of the STS module for quite a while and only used it in "best hope" kind of state - hoping without really knowing that what I did was right. It looked right (i.e. did not break my site), and it worked. But I had no clear idea what I actually did to make it work and was hoping I would never have to revisit and re-tweak or redo any work on it.

However recently I had to upgrade my version of OSC and with it, it needed the latest version of this module. So I thought I best get my mind around this great module and actually have a clearer idea of what to do, what it does, and how to change things.

This module does a whole lot of things and for the deeply technical kind of people, I refer you to Bill Kellum's documentation and to the forum support thread found at STS 4.5.8 OSC Forum. For those of you wanting to get a clearer basic grasp on how to work this, then this should be perfect for you!

I am not covering the installation steps either as they are all included in the module's download.

Overview

STS stands for Simple Template System. And that is what it does brilliantly. It uses templates and placeholders (aka variables) so that you can easily redesign the look and feel of your osCommerce e-commerce site. I don't remember what I had to do before to change the layout of my site, but I know I don't want to go back to that. With STS 4, it is just so much easier!! It requires only modifications to a few OSC files (all instructions given when you download the contribution) and from then on, you will be using a few HTML files to design your layout. Thank God for the good old HTML files!

Folders and Files you will most use

STS 4 comes with folder and files that you have to upload to the appropriate locations in your store file directory. Just follow the installation instructions provided. Once you have done that, all the files should be in place. I will refer to the files and folders you will most use as if your installation is done and they are all in the right place.

Even though you can go into the possibilities of STS much deeper than what I will explain here, this tutorial will give you a clear basic starting understanding of which files you will most use,what they do, and where they are. All the files we are talking about are in 2 main folders. The:
(catalog)/includes/modules/ folder and the
(catalog)/includes/sts_templates/ folder.
Where (catalog) is the folder where you have installed your oscommerce.

For simplicity, I will refer to these directory paths as
/includes/modules/ and
/includes/sts_templates/

And within each of these folders, there are sub-folders of interest which I will now explain briefly.

Script & Placeholders

Within the /includes/modules/ folder, there are 2 sub-folders of interest: /sts/ and /sts_inc/ folder.
All you have to know right now is that:

• /sts/ will contain the script-files (.php files) that will call the appropriate template-files (.html files) to be used. See more about template-files below.
• /sts_inc/ will hold the files that contain the placeholders or variables we will be using on our pages. If you create any new placeholders, they will also be declared and added to the appropriate file in this folder.

Template folders & files

Within the /includes/sts_templates/ folder, there are 2 sub-folders of interest: /full/ and /test/ folder.
I will refer to these folders as your choice of "Template Folders" - which is also what they are called in the STS module as you will see in the osc Admin > Modules section.

Each of these Template Folders contain files that are in HTML format and are your design-layout files to create the look and feel you want. These files are your template files.

When you installed STS, these two Template Folders already contain files you can use straight off or you can copy, duplicate, save as another name and thereby create more customized template files for yourself. The /full/ folder has many more files than the /test/ folder. However it is the /test/ folder we will be using. You can rename this later if you want but for now, I will concentrate on the how-to-use factor.

The /full/ folder, though usable, is mainly used for copying template files over to our working /test/ folder if and when we want more specific or different kinds of (HTML) templates.

The default HTML template file

Let me stress again, it is the HTML template files that, because they are in .html format, you can so easily use to move things around and make changes to how your pages look. These template files are all found in the /includes/sts_templates/ folder. The default HTML template file (the .html template file that will be used if you customize nothing else) is actually found in the Template Folder /test/, specifically:
/includes/sts_templates/test/sts_template.html
Now if you were to open this up in a WYSIWYG editor, you will pretty much see this - showing you the layout and various placeholders. So you can see how easy it is to (re)arrange this one html file to change the look of your pages. So if you change nothing else after enabling STS, this is pretty much how your pages will be laid-out when viewed in the browser - with the correct information displaying in place of the placeholders. (All the placeholders have a $ preceding the word).

4 Modules

STS 4.5.8 (from hereon in, referred to as STS) comes with 4 modules (or sub-modules if you like). All independent of each other so that you can choose to use just 1 or all of them. By default, it is disabled. All you need to do is simply enable them in your osc Admin section. The Default module however must be enabled to use STS at all.