Chapter 2. Setting Up osCommerce

Now that you can rest easy, safe in the knowledge that you are backed by an entire community’s worth of information and resources, it is time to try out osCommerce for real. Most likely, this section should present little to no difficulty whatsoever because osCommerce now comes as part and parcel of many hosting packages. If you haven’t already purchased a hosting package then you might want to ask around in order to find one that supports osCommerce by default.

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t cover how to set everything up properly from start to finish and, to this end, this chapter will cover the following topics:

• Your Site’s Basic Requirements
• Downloading osCommerce
• Transferring osCommerce to your Live Site
• Making sure the host is ready
• Installing and configuring osCommerce
• Troubleshooting

That’s a fair amount of material to cover but you should not feel overwhelmed by this because it is generally in a software producer’s best interest to make it as easy as possible for their clients to download and install software. If they don’t then they leave a gap for someone else to improve on their process. Because the best way to make things easy to understand is by providing a logical and consistent approach to obtaining and installing their software, you will find that for more or less anything you want to get hold of (in this case osCommerce), there is a fairly straightforward and simple process.

Another point to mention is that in order to demonstrate many of the concepts and tasks which will be needed for you to set up your own store, this book will build up a fictional enterprise called Contechst Books, which can be viewed at http://www.contechst.com/catalog/. By demonstrating changes on a real live store, you will be better equipped to relate the changes made to your site’s configuration, customization, and administration to what the customer sees and how he or she uses your store.

No doubt you will be up and running in no time, but if you do experience any problems, please see the troubleshooting section presented at the end of this chapter. Hopefully it will be able to guide you to a solution even if it can’t present the exact one straight away. With that said, let’s begin...