Unofficial PlainCart Website

Due to insistent public demands, I had created an online forum at this address:

http://www.plaincart.info/forums

Happy New Year!

To those who sent me emails and other forms of communications, thank you for trusting me! But please, bear with me as maintaining PlainCart is NOT my only job role. I will try to answer all of your queries within the week.

I will also be very much grateful if you can share a few bucks for the maintenance of this website. Just click on the Donate button at the right sidebar and PayPal will take care of the rest.

Thank you very much!

If you install PlainCart and access the administration page, you are given a default username, which is “admin”, and a default password behind the asterisks. Hitting the login button should bring you directly to the PlainCart Administration page. But what if you encounter this error: “Wrong username or password”?

Was it a flaw in PlainCart? The answer is NOPE! It has something to do with your webhost.

You see, PlainCart uses the PASSWORD function to encrypt sensitive data in your MySQL database, especially passwords. But some webhosts were configured in such a way that they no longer recognizes the PASSWORD function of encryption. A work-around will be to change the encryption method from PASSWORD to MD5. Quite simple. Here’s what you need to do?

1. Open the file “admin/library/functions.php” and locate between lines 39-43 the word PASSWORD(’$password’). Change the word PASSWORD (not the variable name) to md5.

2. Edit the file “admin/user/changePass.php” and between lines 14-31, locate all of the instances of the word PASSWORD and change them all to md5. Be careful not to touch the $password variables.

3. Edit the file “admin/user/processUser.php” and locate between lines 50-58 the word PASSWORD and change them all to md5. On the same file, between lines 64-76, change all the instances of the word PASSWORD to md5.

4. You’re almost done. The next thing you have to do is to change the encrypted password in your database. Open the table tbl_user inside your PlainCart database (you may want to use PHPMyAdmin to do this task easier), click on the BROWSE tab, and edit the values for the record containing the username “admin”. In the user_password field, key-in your desired password for the “admin” username. Under the Function column, choose MD5 and save the data.

5. Head on to your PlainCart Administration page (yourdomain.com/plaincart/admin), key-in “admin” as the username and change the default password with the one you had just saved in the database table. It should make you access the Administration page of PlainCart.

If you got lost with my instructions above, please do not hesitate to email me via robert{dot}reyes{at}gmail{dot}com.

Installing PlainCart in your website will not give you the Philippine Peso as an option to be the default currency. If your target market is in the Philippines, and you would like to use the Philippine Peso as the currency to be used in your online store, you may need to tweak your MySQL database.

1. Login to your cPanel and launch the PHPMyAdmin module.
2. In PHPMyAdmin, choose the database you used for PlainCart, and locate the table “tbl_currency”.
3. Once “tbl_currency” is selected, click on the Insert tab.
4. In the field “cy_code”, key-in PHP or Philippine Peso or whatever currency you wish to use; in the “cy_symbol” field, type the currency symbol. Click on the Go button.
5. Login to the Shop Admin of your PlainCart installation and select the currency that you wish to be used as the default in your online store.

First things first. How do you make PlainCart run on your website? Simply follow these easy steps:

1. Download PlainCart from the link above.
2. Create one (01) MySQL Database with User. This can be done through cPanel or Plesk, if your website hosting gave you one. Otherwise, you may create a database through the command line interface.
3. If your website hosting has a control panel, such as cPanel or Plesk, you may simply upload the entire ZIP package to your public_html (for cPanel) or htdocs (for Plesk) folder. After that, extract the file’s contents, and it should create a folder named as “plaincart”. If your website hosting (webserver) does not have a control panel, simply extract the ZIP package that you had downloaded from our site, and upload the entire contents of the “plaincart” folder to your host.
4. Open the file “config.php” found inside the “library” folder of your PlainCart installation for editting. Supply the necessary information for the following variables inside “config.php”:
   • $dbHost –> 90% of the time, it is just “localhost”
   • $dbUser –> the Database Username
   • $dbPass –> the Database Username Password
   • $dbName — the Database Name
5. At the root folder of your PlainCart installation, locate and open the file “plaincart.sql”. This file contains the table structure for the PlainCart database. Copy the entire contents of this file and paste it to the SQL Query Window using PHPMyAdmin in your cPanel or Plesk. If you do not have cPanel or Plesk, you will need to run the plaincart.sql file using the command line interface
6. You’re done! Point your web browser to the installation of your PlainCart.

Welcome to the Unofficial PlainCart Website!

My aim is to provide support for this wonderful script, originally used at this tutorial website. To set things straight, NO, I do not belong to the development team NOR had I developed this script. I am just a hobby developer during my free time, and I happened to teach Electronic Commerce using PlainCart.