Introduction

Introduction | Introduction | Automatic Fufillment | Control Panel | O3 Start / Stop | Settings | Testing | Debugging

Introduction

The O3 system is a set of PHP/MySQL scripts you install on your webserver. Once set up, they give you a complete, fully-integrated system to manage your websites categories, products, and users, and a whole lot more...

You can see a live demo of O3 here. It's written in PHP and MySQL which are both open-source, and versions are available to run on most platforms.

Philosophy

OfficeTrio (O3) is designed to give the maximum functionality for the minimum expense. It tries to give you all the information it has in a clear and useful way and will NEVER try to hide anything from you.

O3 is not a system designed for dummies - one day it may have a 'Basic/Advanced User' switch, but not yet. It's designed for webmasters and designers who need to put together complex sites quickly - and give the end-user a superb administration facility.

Admin Page Layout

O3's admin pages all follow the same format. It designed to give you easy access to all the available data:

Core Features

O3 handes the full e-commerce life-cycle. These are the core features of O3:

Automatic Fulfillment

O3 reduces the time you need to spend managing your website in many ways. The most obvious is Automatic Fulfillment of Digital Products...

There are a few different ways to deliver your products automatically:

1. Create a download link to the product using the Downloads functionality. This link can be the same for everyone as O3 checks each individuals right to access a file.
2. Send your product in the confirmation email as an attachment.
   
   
3. Include information on how to access the product in the order-confirmation text.
   
   
4. Put (links to) your products on a page which is protected. Then create a 'Membership Product' which gives access to it. (you can provide any number of different 'levels' of access for a page, and in your 'membership products'. See below for more details)

Control Panel

The page o3-index.php is the admin 'Control Panel' page. From here you can access all the other parts of the system.

This page also lists the current version, which database it's running on, the time/date, and any cookies that you may have set from the system:
[ User:(ID-SESSION) Referrer:(ID) ] which is useful for testing.

At the (top &) bottom of all admin pages - is a menu linking you to all the other pages

The O3 Start / Stop Files

The file o3start.php is included in your webpages to enable O3's features. It is also where you define a few key settings. This file should be setup prior to running the database-build because the values are used to create default settings in the main settings database table (example: the website-url is used to create default return and cancel pages for payments).

Here's a list of them:

Note that O3 is designed to be optionally installed in two places: a development machine - i.e. your PC, and a production machine - i.e. your webserver. As discussed in the installation notes, it's possible to setup different URLs and database login details for the 'local' and 'remote' machines, and O3 automatically senses where it's running and uses the appropriate ones.

Please refer to the comments in the file itself for details on what all the settings are, and how to use them.

IMPORTANT: You must ensure that you don't put any characters - including whitespace (like space or carriage-returns) - at the top or bottom of this file - it will give an error message like '...headers already sent...'

To enable O3 features in a web page, include the following code right at the top of the page (assumes O3 is installed in the 'o3' directory):
<? include 'o3/o3start.php'; ?>

...and this must be included at the end of the page - before the closing </body> tag - to close the database connections (otherwise you may run out of database processes!)
<? include 'o3/o3stop.php'; ?>

Settings Manager

The Settings-Manager (settings-manager.php) is where you manage all your website settings. Here's a list of the main areas in there:

Not all the settings may be relevant to you, and most have reasonable defaults setup, but there are some which you must set up with you own values:

• General Ecommerce / Billing Start Date. This is when your site starts trading. Set this so you don't get unwanted months is reports (or miss some!).
• General Ecommerce / Currency Symbol. Ensure it's correct for you.
• PayPal / PayPal Email. Ensure this is a valid email address registered to your PayPal account.
• StormPay / StormPay Email. Ensure this is a valid email address registered to your StormPay account.
• StormPay / Secret Code. Ensure this is the value set in your StormPay account.
• Membership. Define whether your website offers free and / or paid memberships.
• Email. Have a quick look to ensure the email settings are correct. You will have to enter your own email body text here

Testing

The O3 demo website - which you receive a copy of - contains lots of code, containers and examples of how to implement and test an O3 installation. O3 will usually complain is data is missing or wrong, but there may be cases where it doesn't catch an error.

You can use the debug mode functionality described below to find out what functions of queries are being run - and that may help isolating problems.

See the IPN Manual Page for information on testing the IPN process.

Debugging

O3 has a debug parameter which causes it to display information about what it's doing: dbg. You can combine any of the codes below:

• c - Show caching information
• f - Show function calls
• q - Show queries

The implementation is not exhaustive. Some functions and queries are not displayed. This may change in a later version.

To disable debug mode

If you want to disable this feature, simply change the function dbg in o3-func.php like this:

//===============
// FUNCTION: dbg
//--------------------------------------------------------
// Return TRUE / FALSE is the specified error code is set
//========================================================
function dbg ($code) {
  return (strpos($_REQUEST['dbg'], $code)!==FALSE) ? TRUE : FALSE;
  }

//===============
// FUNCTION: dbg
//--------------------------------------------------------
// Return TRUE / FALSE is the specified error code is set
//========================================================
function dbg ($code) {
  return FALSE;
  }

OfficeTrio: The Integrated ECommerce Solution
Introduction - User Manual