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

Chapter 11. Deployment and Maintenance

The big day has finally arrived! By the end of this chapter your site goes live, and only a few minor deployment issues now stand in between you and the millions of online customers out there. Well, actually that's not quite true. Making sure you deploy your store properly is quite an involved process and you really need to keep your thinking cap on over the course of this chapter. To qualify this last statement, I should make it clear that there's nothing particularly complex about deployment, it's just that you need to keep on top of a lot of different issues. Making silly errors at this stage can have dramatic effects on the final product because we are dealing mainly with configuration issues when we deploy a fully developed application. Of course, making errors is not the end of the world, because we are going to test everything very thoroughly.

It seems a bit unfair that you can have a perfectly working site on your development machine, but a...