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

Summary


For a task as important as building an online e-commerce site, it is necessary that you spend a lot of time considering your options, and developing and testing your site. Since it is not really feasible to do this sort of work on the live site, you need to employ a development machine to aid you. Because of this, the topic of deployment is an important one in the overall scheme of things because it is deployment that actually links your finished development to the live store that customers can use.

This chapter outlined a solid process for preparing for deployment, followed by several of the most common methods for transferring files. Of course, it was also necessary to set up a new database on the host site, but this should be relatively easy because any good host should make the task fairly simple by providing a tool like phpMyAdmin to work with the database.

Hopefully you came to realize that the deployment process itself is not particularly complex for an osCommerce site, since...