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 Sites 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...
The first thing you need is a web domain, which will allow people to visit your site by typing in your business’s URI (Universal Resource Indicator). There are plenty of excellent hosting packages available online, and you should choose one based on the criteria that suit your business’s needs the best. Ensuring that you understand what your site is likely to need in the future is a good way to determine what type of hosting package you need now.
You might want to think about ensuring you have FTP capability for transferring files to the host—this is not entirely necessary, so wait until you have read the section entitled Transferring osCommerce to Your Live Site a little later on in this chapter. More often than not, you should be able to log on to your FTP account with your administrator’s username and password automatically. If you’re not sure what all this is about, then try the following URL in your browser (assuming your browser supports FTP):ftp://ftp.your_domain_name.com
If you are prompted for a password or are shown the contents of your home directory, then congratulations, you have an FTP account. If you don’t have one, then you should consider getting your host to give you one, or finding out from them how they upload files. Incidentally, instead of being prompted for your username and password every time you use your FTP account, you might want to send them in the URL, like so:ftp://username:password@hostname/
If you’re worried about security (by this I mean: you are worried about security), then it’s best to leave out the password and simply pass the username, because this can cause security problems if URLs are logged in a non-secure place.
A quick recap of the bare necessities you require from a hosting package is as follows:
- Apache: Used to serve web pages. Your host will need to make use of Apache as its web server of choice as opposed to something like Microsofts IIS.
- PHP: Your host must provide support for PHP since this is the language in which osCommerce is written.
- MySQL: You should also be able to obtain a MySQL account for use by osCommerce since this is what drives the data, or back end, of the osCommerce application.
You might also want to make sure the provider is giving you enough hard disk space to safely run the business. Remember that you will probably have a lot of log files and a fair number of images as well as data in your database. They should also provide some form of SSL support, depending on what your security needs will be. Beyond that, you should also look for fair pricing, reliability (specifically, look for percentage downtime), and ease of use, as well as email facilities.
Since many hosts have the three pieces of software installed by default, as part of their hosting package, it is quite likely that they also come with the option to simply enable osCommerce on your domain. It is obviously very easy to install osCommerce on your live site this way (generally it is simply a case of clicking on the osCommerce option and supplying a username and password for your administrative duties) and you should simply follow any instructions given by your hosts or contact their support if you have any queries.
If, however, your hosting plan does not come with the option to enable osCommerce by default then you will need to download a copy and ensure it gets to your live site in one piece.