Book Image

Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Beginner Edition

By : David Mercer
Book Image

Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Beginner Edition

By: David Mercer

Overview of this book

Using an easy-to-read and engaging style, this book introduces the fundamentals of osCommerce, and helps you build your first online store. It covers the out-of-the-box features of osCommerce, but it also shows you how to customize the application to your own needs. The book starts with the basics of downloading and installing osCommerce, or simply how to enable it on your Internet domain using the tools provided by your host. All of the most important configuration issues are explained, with clear instructions and advice to help you make the right choices. Once osCommerce is installed and configured, you will take a good look at how to work with your store's data including product information as well as other data which is responsible for keeping your site healthy. The all important topic of customization is also dealt with comprehensively. You will see how to develop attractive sites that will make your store a pleasure to browse and your products a pleasure to buy! Of course, no discussion on osCommerce would be complete without a look at how to obtain and treat payments. Using the modules provided with osCommerce you will be collecting money from your happy customers in no time! Once the reader has a fully fledged, and operational site it is time to look at deployment? an important topic for discussion if development has taken place on a development machine. The appendix will add a few tools to your armory and shed some light as to what is going on behind the scenes in case things go awry.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

The osCommerce Online Community


Having a good technical know-how is one thing, but being able to effectively use the osCommerce community is at times equally important. Part of learning how to use osCommerce effectively must, at some point, take into account that no one needs to develop applications in isolation. The opportunity to learn from other peoples’ mistakes before you fall into the same traps is a great boon for budding website developers. Even better, once you have encountered a problem, it is a pretty safe bet that someone else probably has had that same problem and already dealt with it, which means that a solution might be available on the forums.

Apart from providing ready-made solutions to problems, as well as a huge repository of information, the osCommerce community is a living entity with which we can all interact. Exchanging ideas and information is an integral part of learning and the open source ethos suits the learning-as-a-collective paradigm very well. Just as important is the Contributions section, which can provide you with hundreds of different add-ons to do almost anything you can conceive of without having to write the code yourself. Consequently, it is imperative that you know how to manage and use this valuable resource.

Contributions

One of the great things about programming is the ability to reuse code. This means that if some PHP guru decides he or she needs to extend the functionality provided by default with osCommerce, they can write the code that will perform the task they have in mind, and can then make that code available to everyone. Sounds almost too good to be true, but this is in fact true, and you can browse through the contributions section at http://www.oscommerce.com/ community/contributions/ to take a look for yourself.

This resource provides a categorized list of all the different contributions available to users like you and me. All the contributions listed on the site are provided freely under the GNU general public license (make sure you read and understand any additional license information provided with a contribution). It’s worth checking this out, and you can find a copy of the license at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html. Other than providing a categorized list of contributions, there are also two options to search through the latest and most downloaded packages.

It is important to realize that these contributions are often developed by individuals, and while they are an excellent resource, at times they can contain bugs. You will notice that many of the download pages have multiple versions of each package each one fixing bugs or improving on the last version. Accordingly, you should always approach the use of contributions with caution, and at all times endeavor to understand exactly how the package is working to achieve its tasks.

Once we start adding some advanced functionality, we will come back to this topic and run through how to download, install, and modify community contributions.

Forums

The idea behind the osCommerce Forums is to provide a kind of huge noticeboard for everyone involved in osCommerce to ask questions and search for answers. It also provides a convenient way to meet other people in the same boat, which can be a useful means of sharing ideas and discussing technical issues with people at the same level of experience. Specifically, the following interesting and useful topics, among others, can be found at the osCommerce forums:

  • News and announcements

  • General support

  • Installation and configuration

  • Tips and tricks

  • Contribution announcements

  • Contribution support

  • General chitchat

  • Next steps

  • E-commerce laws

With approximately 70,000 registered users and hundreds of people online at any given time, it is certain that you will find at least a part of the answer you need from the forums. However, bear in mind that like any public service, there are rules and guidelines to abide by when using these facilities. A quick read over the rules at http://forums.oscommerce.com/index.php?act= boardrules should avoid any infringements of netiquette.

One of the main points to remember is that you should make an honest effort to search for similar posts before adding your own post to any of the lists—obviously it is nice to keep redundancy in the lists to a minimum. This is quite a big point because it is notoriously hard to find the exact postings you are looking for. The forum gives you the option of ordering the posts based on a few criteria, searching for only those posts posted recently, and so on.

Of course, you are encouraged to register as a forum user in order to make use of the forums properly-you will find that you are able to use the search features without any problems.

Knowledge Base

The osCommerce Knowledge Base takes a different approach to help osCommerce users. It is more of a documentation effort taking the form of a series of articles that describe a wide variety of osCommerce issues and topics. Navigating to the homepage for the knowledge base at http://www.oscommerce.info/ gives the following page:

As you can see, the list on the left-hand side provides a categorized table of articles, which is really easy to use. Each article covers a single topic, and all of them can be ranked in terms of how useful you found them. The downside is that not everything has had an article written about it yet. So, while this may be the answer for your more run-of-the-mill queries, it is unlikely that it will provide you with a solution or example for more complex problems. Having said this, it is a community project, and new articles are added all the time—definitely something worth using and supporting.

Documentation

The official documentation is available online and as a download. It is recommended that you use the downloadable version, since this will be available to you whenever you need it regardless of whether an Internet connection is available. The documentation uses a different method from the forums and knowledge base. This time, each aspect of osCommerce is briefly discussed in an easy-to-navigate HTML-based hierarchy. A complete listing can be found in the table of contents at http://www.oscommerce.info/docs/english/table_of_contents.html. Perusing this is definitely worthwhile for novice and experienced osCommerce users alike, although many of you will find the information a bit terse or even sparse in places.

Bug and Progress Reports

Another worthwhile exercise is to look at the bug reports at http://www.oscommerce.com/ community/bugs/, which are nicely categorized, and are assigned to various experienced members of the community to either verify and act upon or dismiss as bogus. At the very least, browsing the bug lists provides a good method of seeing whether any problems you may have been experiencing could be the result of a bug. If you do suspect a bug in your installation of osCommerce, you should report it, but only after you have made certain it is not simply inexplicable behavior. Obviously, every bug report needs to be looked at, so it consumes someone’s time and effort to investigate a report—make reports only after some deliberation.

Progress reports can be found ahttp://www.oscommerce.com/community/reports and are very useful in terms of keeping abreast of the latest news within the osCommerce community. For example, the latest update at the time of writing (http://www.oscommerce.com/community/reports,115) contained information on the following and more:

  • Team Reorganization: The osCommerce team has been reorganized to optimize the amount of resources available, and to spread responsibilities throughout the team.

  • New Support Site Navigation Menu: A new navigation menu has been added to the support site, which now offers drop-down menu entries to the pages in each section of the support site.

  • Forum Structure Updates: The forum structure has been updated to improve the usability of which postings should be made in which forum channels.

  • Daylight Saving Time On The Forum: To correctly set the time on the forums to reflect daylight saving time, please go to your Control Panel | Options | Board Settings and select the "Is daylight saving time in effect?" option.

  • Daylight Saving Time On The Forum: To correctly set the time on the forums to reflect daylight saving time, please go to your Control Panel | Options | Board Settings and select the "Is daylight saving time in effect?" option.

  • Knowledge Base Update: A Table of Contents has been added to the knowledge base site to provide an overview of all knowledge base articles currently available.

  • Most Downloaded Contributions: The Contributions section has been updated to allow browsing the contribution packages ordered by the most downloaded.

Obviously, this is all pretty pertinent information for the active osCommerce community member. Talking of being an active community member, a pretty fair statement about the community, of which you are now a member, is that you get out what you put in. The online community is a great resource, and with your help it will only improve.