Finally went live!

Thanks for the help. Been on Yahoo's platform for the last 14 years, finally went live with OpenCart this past Friday. The site is https://www.carguygarage.com/

The basics of the set up are -
Server at https://www.digitalocean.com/
CPU Optimized Droplet
CentOS Linux 7
MariaDB Server 5.5
Apache 2.4
PHP 7.2 (OPcache enabled)

https://www.cloudflare.com
Proxied DNS, SSL, Firewall, CDN, HTTP/2, and a bunch of other things.

https://www.fail2ban.org
It gets tricky using CloudFlare with Fail2Ban on Apache. The DNS is proxied with CloudFlare, so the Apache logs always show the IP of the proxied DNS instead of the user. You need to use an Apache mod to log the IP of the user. Then you need to set up API calls to CloudFlare from the jail on Fail2Ban so that the user is blocked and unblocked at the proxied DNS. -- Blocking the proxied DNS IP will block everyone using that DNS, not just the bad user. Blocking the IP address at server level won’t stop the bad user since the user is coming in from the proxied DNS IP. Also the default bad bots with Fail2Ban are old and should be greatly expanded.

https://restic.net/ to https://www.backblaze.com/
I have this set up creating backups of the entire www directory and database dumps on crontabs. Restic is really nice since it only stores the delta keeping many updates small with the option to revert to any previous backup. BackBlaze is shockingly inexpensive too. I have DigitalOcrean doing backups, but they are less frequent, and it’s best to have everything backed up at an entirely different location - just in case...

https://www.opencart.com/
Version 3
Extensions installed:
Export/Import
https://www.opencart.com/index.php?rout ... sion_id=17
multi parent category
https://www.opencart.com/index.php?rout ... n_id=18829
Product sort and filter by category
https://www.opencart.com/index.php?rout ... n_id=21467
Path Manager
https://www.opencart.com/index.php?rout ... on_id=4085
And a couple others I wrote:
Real time order posting to the order management system I wrote
A simple way to mark products noindex
Watermark images with opacity
...etc.

https://matomo.org/ - web statistics via JavaScript similar to Google Analytics (but without Big Brother)
https://goaccess.io/- web statistics via Apache logs, great for seeing what Apache is doing but won’t give you information like what screen size and brower the customer is using which is why both are a good idea.

https://piwigo.org
We wrote our own code many years ago to manage the customer photos that we received. The code has morphed over the years, but the one thing that always stuck since the start was that the photos were arranged by how people voted on them. Now there are about 10,000 garage photos, and this software was the clear choice with the voting and sorting by votes already part of the base system.

Anyway, that’s some of the geeky back end that makes the front end web site operate. The back end systems that the front end web site talk to, most of which I wrote, still need some updating but that shouldn’t be much of a problem.

I don’t see my module written in your list !

by mona wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 27, 2020 6:13 am

I don’t see my module written in your list !

Yeah, I used Journal so didn't need much for display mods.

Interesting .. that is my module on your site !
I know .. I wrote it ..

by mona wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 27, 2020 9:36 am

Interesting .. that is my module on your site !
I know .. I wrote it ..

Well I paid for any module that a payment was asked. Not sure what you're seeing, but most of the display is done with Journal 3. I know I did not install your extension. Your extension does not look very complicated though.

The best and most beautifully designed things usually don’t ..

The revealing part is that with all the possibilities … the exact same mistake ..

What is revealing about you is your intense promotion of Journal; most revealing about you is you know which extension I am talking about. My guess is that you have an affiliation with them.

No affiliation at all. I didn't even mention Journal here until you self promoted your extension. Not sure why you're so grumpy, hope you have a good day.

Beautifully done site!

Nicely done sir!

Can i make a recommendation?

You should really break up your tekst with more headings. Not only is it good for SEO but it's also helps your readers to quickly scan your text and evaluate if the content is interesting to them.

You can google the concept and why it should be avoided but i found this quick guide that can help you get started: http://hananiahwilson.com/dreaded-wall-of-text/

Site looks nice mate well done.

One small thing you may want to look at is to change the colour of the hover in the footer links
If you hover over About Us or Contact (for example) the colour of the link changes to grey and it is hard to see on the dark blue background

I am old so it may be my eyes lol

Thanks for the feedback. I've been quite busy lately getting the site tied into the other systems we have, so I haven't had time to go back and adjust things yet. I have a list of design changes I'd like to make, but only have 2 hands and so many hours in a day I'll get there, but for now I'm stuck with setting up API's so that we can update the site easily from our other systems. I'm getting there! So far very happy with the move to OC.

Your website is great, beautifully designed.

trà đen, lục trà lài, trà thái xanh

Thanks, been quite busy with the API's the last few days. Nice to see it tie into the other systems like I had hoped. The future looks bright!