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)

Working with Boxes and Columns


As you will have noticed over the course of the book so far, the site consists of a central column reserved for text or product images and information, surrounded on either side by columns of boxes, which hold anything from the navigation structure to a keyword search. Naturally, you might wish to change this general structure in favor of something that suits your site better. There is really an unlimited number of possible changes, and you could quite easily alter the structure sufficiently to eradicate most if not all the evidence of the original layout.

For the first time, we are going to put down the administration tool and get involved directly with the PHP code within the site’s files, and to get the ball rolling, we will start by removing a box. You know by now that contechst.com retails only English-language books and so there is now no longer any need to have a box showing the various languages available on the site. As a result, we would like to erase...