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

Getting Ready to Deploy


First things first! Are you sure you are completely happy with your site as it is? While it is not a huge problem to make modifications to your site after deployment, there is no point in making things hard for yourself by having to recode some pages or make design changes then, when you can get them done now. If everything is in order, then we can begin with the preparation process.

Preparation comes in three stages. First, we need to ensure that we have a nice, clean, working version of the site. We also need a nice, clean, working copy of the database, and finally, a nice, clean file system ready for the files on the host site. Once you have all three, read on...

Make Sure the Host is Ready

Intuitively enough, the first thing to do is to make sure you have an adequate host. By this I mean you have a host on which you can create a MySQL database, and which allows access to the file system, and whatever other goodies you think you may need. To make your life easy, you...