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

Easy Populate


Ok, till now we have really stayed on the nerdy, safe side of things by sticking to the default administration tool options, which, while they will get the job done, are pretty boring and slow. Its time to role up the sleeves and perform the first of many enhancements to osCommerce. You can look at community contributions as a way of extending or enhancing the native functionality provided by osCommerce, and it's largely due to the osCommerce community that osCommerce itself is such a success.

Having an easily extensible product is one of the great advantages of modern computing, and you are about to see why. If you have already tried to enter more than a few tens of products at a time then you will appreciate how automating that task is a real lifesaver. Specifically, Easy Populate (EP) allows you to populate and update products in many categories using data from any of the following:

  • Excel spreadsheet

  • OpenOffice spreadsheet

  • Filemaker database

  • Access database

  • Delimited text file...