Linking to osCommerce product pages within Joomla Wrapper

[doogals]

Solution Description: How to create links in Joomla to individual product pages in osCommerce with osCommerce contained in Joomla Wrapper

Environment: osCommerce 2.2 and Joomla 1.0.12

Background: Integrated osCommerce as a Wrapper within a Joomla site. Only after the store was configured & propagated with products did I realize the hiccup in creating links in the Joomla pages that could point to individual product pages within osCommerce.

Solution Method: Create individual "unpublished" Menu Wrappers that point to each osCommerce product

Solution Detail:

1. Determine URL of your individual product page in your store you want to link to. For example:
http://www.yourdomain.com/store/catalog ... ucts_id=37

2. Within Joomla, go to Menu and create a new Menu Item of the type WRAPPER. Name this new Menu Item with identifying text and for the URL enter your product URL from step 1 above.

3. Hit the "Apply" button in Joomla. Joomla will now create a unique URL for this new Menu Item. You can view it under the URL of the store's product. It should look something like: index.php?com_wrapper&Itemid=144. You'll need to copy that URL. Before Saving this page, set it to be "unpublished".

4. Take that Menu Item URL from step 3 and use that as the link within your Joomla pages to point to that individual product in osCommerce.

My experience has been that since the entire navigation between osCommerce and Joomla is taking place within the frame of the Wrapper, the osCommerce session information is maintained and the Shopping Cart items remain present while navigating back and forth between the osCommerce store and the rest of the Joomla site.