[ic] desired: clean HTML for barry store

[Alter Ego]

I have been adapting the barry example store to a
custom catalog that I am developing. This is because
some key tags used such as loop-exec and the
search/scan tag are not fully documented so I don't
want to touch that for now :-) I just want to get it
working.

Much of the HTML has font tags in it and the table
coding is absolutely horrendous! A big improvement
over the 4.5.3 release is that the inner tables no
longer have absolute sizes but now use percentage
sizes.

A better way of making display of the generated HTML
more configurable would be to use cascading
stylesheets instead of TD BG=__CONTRAST__ etc.

Some bugs I have discovered:

A)

1) log in as a user
2) go to account maintenance 
3) don't enter any value for shipping/billing
addressbook nickname
4) click on save shipping or billing
5) boom. you're no more in the store, plain text on
the browser screen with an internal error.

This should be trapped at a higher level, such as in
the ord/basket.html page where a check should be made
for an empty nick and a default value inserted if the
nick is empty!

B) Saved shopping carts do not quite work. Logging in
later does not show saved carts.

C) In account.html, for shipping address, changing
countries to Other results in an empty listbox. The
corresponding code in checkout.html works fine though!

D) Buy an item with a long name and go to your
shopping cart, the rounded corners of the HTML are not
shown because the display extends to the right instead
of wrapping. I believe this is because the colspan=2
at the end of the config/leftonly template does not
agree with the config/noright template!

E) The logout.html page has to use a different
template than config/leftonly or the config/left*
templates have to conditionally check a set variable
to find out if we are logging out. This is because
after log out, one sees -> You are not logged out or
Bye-bye cookies and below on the same screen, you are
logged in as Joe User. Not consistent.

F) Sometimes one can create a new, different user and
return to the store in the same session. In this case,
one finds pre-existing orders in the shopping basket!
Login as test with password test, make some orders,
log out and go straight to account.html (Customer
Service)

Other issues:

I am considering writing a GUI tool to maintain and
output area.txt cat.txt and product.txt files in order
to properly separate labour needed for store design,
store creation, store administration etc. 

Apparently some fields in area.txt are conditional and
contain different content depending on other fields!
Haven't yet completely engineered the data
relationships, but the structure and inter-relatedness
of all the tables is quite complex.

Basically I need good documentation on area.txt
cat.txt and product.txt so I can build an Explorer
like tool where you click on a folder, see subfolders
etc in the folder side of things and see your products
in the product side of things, use drag and drop to
change products from category to say another category
and hopefully send the whole damn thing to the server
via encrypted+signed email and have some script drop
the whole shebang right into the products directory.
Presto! The whole store is updated and yet the
customer or data entry staff cannot modify the more
critical tables controlling things such as site
layout, ordering of navigation tabs etc.

Overall, this is an excellent product and I hope I can
do what I can to make this better and contribute to
the community as well.

For the record, I am based in Accra, Ghana and intent
on kick starting e-commerce here in a big way by
creating turnkey software. The backend will, of
course, be Interchange. My server is usually at
http://www.webstar.com.gh and my email is usually
guido@webstar.com.gh but I have been recently hacked
by global hell (i suspect) resulting in a denial or
service for both web and my email. They had installed
a rootkit and the only way to find them was to check
netstat output each time you change your password! 

For all other practical purposes they were invisible.
ie not in process list, /proc, files cannot be seen by
ls, mysterious strings such as *nazgul* lurk in the
system glibc and other binaries etc.

Until I buy another machine and install OpenBSD on it
and migrate my data, I remain caught_one@yahoo.com

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