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)

Catalog


The Catalog section of the administration tool is a pretty nifty piece of content management software. You can control your stock with a fine tooth comb from here, and although it is not complete on its own, using some of the community contributions to extend the default functionality provided should give you all the help you need to run and maintain the stock on your site; as mentioned, you may wish to look at EasyPopulate in order to upload a number of products at once.

Before we begin by looking at the subsections of the Catalog administration tool, there are a few things that you should know beforehand. Above and beyond the standard functionality provided, osCommerce also gives you a drop-down navigation list to help find your way around your data directory structure, as well as a search tool. If you open up the Catalog page, you will be presented with something like this:

Use the Search textbox (type in the name of the product or category and hit Enter) to find products or categories...