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


It is at this point that I should confess that I have lied to you ever so slightly. Recall that our aim in this chapter was to get 80% of the configuration done for only 20% of the effort; well, that's not really what has happened. There are quite a few more tasks to perform before we can consider the site to be more or less configured—we have done maybe 30-40% in reality, with many of the settings subject to change on the live site. That's not to say you should get despondent about how much further there is to go, because there have been some very valuable lessons learned in this chapter for very little effort.

What we have done is gone through the very basic and most general settings, which in turn has forced us to think about how we want our osCommerce application to behave in the end, which is always a worthwhile exercise. This is extremely important, as you have now been exposed to the type of things one needs to contemplate before making decisions that influence the running...