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


Designing and implementing your product data structure is one of the most vital jobs involved in setting up your osCommerce store and hopefully you now find it quite easy. Consequently, you should feel pretty relaxed at this stage because you have almost all your data related needs sorted out, or at the very least, understand exactly how to deal with your data.

From this chapter, you have learned that categorizing your products and setting their attributes is not quite as straightforward as it may seem on the surface. Provided you think before you act, you will be just fine with regards to these and many other concepts. Of course, dealing with data can be fairly tricky even if you have a good structure, and we have seen how osCommerce helps us handle data updates and changes by giving us various options such as linking or duplicating, or warning us if we are trying to delete something with dependencies.

Having covered most of the administration tool's data-related options we took...