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                        Reason #1.414213562 I hate PHP

[The cubicle with that neat Zen-like emptiness to it] [1] [2] Work was there.
But then again, I was in my cubicle with that neat Zen-like emptiness to it
[3].

Today's PHP problem I don't think was necessarily a PHP problem as it was a
lack of documentation about installation. One of the clients uses OSCommerce
[4], an open-source shopping cart management system and one of the modules
“supposedly installed” was EasyPopulate (three hours to find this particular
little link) [5], which allows one to populate the product database on the
webserver from a spreadsheet. The customer used it once before, but that was
then.

This is now.

Try as I might, I could not get the module to load. It was there, written in
PHP, on the server, nestled among all the other PHP modules making up the
shopping cart. Only it would not run.

Or rather, the shopping cart software would refuse to run it.

Or something like that.

It took me the better part of an hour (using Google [6]) to find anything
close to installation notes, for a slightly different version (“let me tell
you about slightly different versions … ”) and it wasn't terribly surprising
when those instructions didn't work.

Another hour or so was wasted trying to locate the module to download any
version; old, new, borrowed, blue, anything.

I will say that the OSCommerce site looks good, but actually finding anything
useful? Like … oh … the software? It's a sad state of affairs when one
realizes that one downloaded what they were looking for by mistake (I was
trying to download OSCommerce itself, thinking the module was one of those
that used to be third party but had become part of the main distribution—I
thought I downloaded OSCommerce but instead I had downloaded the latest
version of the Easy Populate module). Yes, the site is that bad.

Now, the installation of the module. The module itself came with no
installation guide, I guess on the assumption that you have the OSCommerce
guide and that tells you how to install modules, cause the Good Lord knows
that what I thought was the module installation module wasn't installing
modules. I ended up having to go through the source code to the module,
finding out why it was refusing to run and found the answer—because the
module wasn't listed in one of the database tables that OSCommerce uses.

Some sixy SQL (Standard Query Language) statments later (one to see what was
in that particular table, one that I botched so badly that it basically wiped
out that particular table, and fifty-eight to restore the table and add the
new module) it was added and would now run.

Not correctly mind you, but it would run.

Some more hacking on the module (“no, the product database doesn't have those
fields, so forget about them!”) and I think it works.

I hope.

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2004/11/15/thumb.pb150001.jpg
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2004/11/15/pb150001.jpg
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2004/11/15/pb150001.jpg
[4] http://www.oscommerce.com/
[5] http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,500
[6] http://www.google.com/

Email author at [email protected]

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