The first chapter highlighted the fact that all development should take place on a copy of the website on a computer to which the public has no access. This computer was called the development machine, and is where most of your time will be spent getting everything right before transferring the more or less finished product to the live site. In order to be able to work effectively, and ensure that the development environment provides us with everything we need to be able to deliver our website, we need to find, download, and install the following software:
PHP: PHP is the language in which osCommerce is written. Recently it has received a major upgrade and is now more or less a fully functional Object Oriented Language, with some very powerful features. PHP is widely used on the Internet for a multitude of different projects and is renowned for its ease of use. The current version of PHP is PHP5, which is what we will use in this book for...