Book Image

Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Professional Edition

By : David Mercer
Book Image

Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Professional Edition

By: David Mercer

Overview of this book

<p>The book can be read from front to back, but each chapter is self contained so the reader can skip chapters to read those that they are interested in. Each chapter will move from basic to advanced where applicable and also relate what the administrator (reader) is doing to how this affects what the client sees on the site.</p> <p>So, for example, the customization chapter will start off with a discussion on the concept of design and how to relate this to your business. Once the reader has a clear idea of what they need to do, we look at some really simple changes such as modifying the site's language, before moving to some advanced modifications which may involve some PHP programming. At the same time the discussion will demonstrate how the changes made affect the site.</p> <p>Throughout the book, much consideration is given to the "right" way to doing things. Readers will have the great advantage that they begin, from the very start, doing things properly. This will save them a lot of time and effort in the years to come as they build on and modify their site. Utilizing best practices and sound methodologies is a great asset for beginners and experienced users alike.</p> <p>At all times, the coverage given in this book pays homage to the fact that, ultimately, the reader has a business goal in mind. To this end, the material never gets bogged down in technical issues or long discourses, but rather focuses on what is practically important for the online business and then moves on. To complement this, there are plenty of suggestions and hints as to how and where to look for further information.</p>
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Professional Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Foreword
Introduction
Index

Tools


It's easy to sit back at this stage and consider the site as fit to go live; but consider the revenue-generating possibility of banner ads, which we haven't even looked at yet. Normally, this might be a tricky thing to implement, but osCommerce ships with its own banner manager to help us out. As a result it is important that we look at this quite closely in order to make effective use of the tool and banner ads.

Tools are not all about adding functionality to your site of course. A useful tool, which is ubiquitous in the open-source world, is the phpMyAdmin tool for administering MySQL databases. If your host provides you with MySQL as part of your hosting package, you can be fairly certain that they will also make phpMyAdmin available for your use. If not, ask them why not, because you will find it a lot easier to work with phpMyAdmin than having to manually issue commands every time you need to query your database.

Let's begin with the banner manager...

Banner Manager

Naturally, should...