Installing Os Commerce

[surefire]

Critical Mass has a well established online store for knives and other related items. I created a store which has yet to go live but is almost fully functional. I set it up for a veterinarian to sell pet medications and supplies to his clients in Miami.

 

After seeing more questions in the past few weeks concerning OS Commerce, a free shopping cart script, I decided to interview Critical Mass and get his thoughts on setting up an online store.

 

surefire: Rob, how long has the Knife & Blade Shop been up and running?

 

Critical Mass: in various incarnations, about 2 years now

 

surefire: And did you try other shopping carts or did you grab OS Commerce right off the bat?

 

Critical Mass: I started with FP and used a paypal cart for a while.... I didn’t think it looked professional so I went hunting... I think I looked at what TCH had to offer , OSC wasn’t available at the time....

 

I just didn’t like the "plain Jane" look of them so I hit Google and found OSC

 

surefire: Anyone who's downloaded OSC knows that it's a huge script (software package). Did you know php programming when you installed it?

 

Critical Mass: I didn’t know what PHP meant let alone how to code it

 

surefire: Then how did you go about making the modifications. When you first install OS Commerce, the banner says OS Commerce and yet your store has it's own banner. How'd you pull that off?

 

Critical Mass: Install file and OSC forums, everything I had questions about was already answered in either place.

 

For the basic install though, everything was in the install file

 

surefire: Did you upload all of your product data manually? Or is there a trick to getting the info into the database a little easier?

 

Critical Mass: At first I did it all by hand.... then I found a contribution that allowed me to upload many products at once with less work from a delimited Excel file

 

surefire: Do you happen to remember what it was called?

 

Critical Mass: Easy Populate, I think it will handle 3000 items at once

surefire: That's the same one I used. It's pretty handy.

 

Critical Mass: once you get it going it really is quick

surefire: So what did you find to be the most difficult part when you were first setting up your shop

 

Critical Mass: Good question..... It was all nuances of PHP itself in the personal configuring....

 

There wasn’t any one thing that was a bear, it was little things tripping me up

 

surefire: Let's walk someone through a setup...  Is it any more difficult to install by ftp as opposed to CPanel?

 

Critical Mass: It can be.... One click install is the fastest to get it on your site

 

surefire: And you don't have to mess around with the database. I'll go ahead and run through the steps for setting up a database... even though the CPanel install does it for you.

 

First, you log into Cpanel

 

Then you click 'Manage MySQL'

 

Then you create a database. The tricky part is that the name of your database will actually be your username, underscore, the name you typed... like username_dbname

 

Then you create a user and a password.

 

Once again, the username will be in the form, username_newuser

 

And the step that everyone forgets is to assign the user to the database. If you forget this step, the code for OS Commerce won't work

 

Once again, if you install OS Commerce in Cpanel, all of these steps are avoided. All you have to do is go to Addon Scripts in Cpanel.

 

I'd say the only reason not to use CPanel is if you want to install OSC somewhere other than an upper directory. So if you want to install at www.yoursite.com/dir/store/ then you need to do it by hand.

 

Critical Mass: And I just installed it in a test directory while we were covering these steps and it was installed in about 10 seconds

 

surefire: Yeah... it's really very easy to get up and running.

 

Now you followed instructions to modify your store... I sort of opened up all the files to see how the parts worked and made changes by trial and error. Both work fine.

 

Critical Mass: I did do the CSS by hand but that’s not a big deal really

 

surefire: Is there something that you wish you had known when you first started out that would have made your life much easier when you set up OSC?

 

Critical Mass: Yes...

 

Check all of the contributions out before you really get into it....

 

If I had done Easy Populate and the Meta Tag contrib I would have saved a lot of time

 

surefire: That's good advice.

 

I found that pulling the files open and seeing how OS Commerce works is actually much easier than say Invision Board.

 

Invision Board is structured in a way that uses classes or Object Oriented Programming whereas OSC uses basic php functions.

 

Critical Mass: I am just getting started in Invision but I have to say I have picked up much from doing it by hand with OSC

 

surefire: In both cases, you'll notice that pretty much every page runs off that index.php file. So if you open it up, and start reading line by line, you'll come across instructions that say 'include "suchandsuch.php";' and you can go open that file and see what goes on in there.

 

I just thought I'd mention it for anyone who wanted to hack their way through the code and make major modifications like I did... or they can follow instructions like you did.

 

Anyhow, is there anything else that you'd add?

 

Critical Mass: I liked the fact that in OSC there are notes in many places telling you what a line is for

 

surefire: Yes. It's well documented, so you get a real feel for what they're trying to do, every step of the way

 

I know what I want to ask:

 

Critical Mass: What's that?

 

surefire: How did you set up your payment system? Own ssl, 2checkout, paysystems?

 

Critical Mass: I have my own SSL and there is a contribution for passing the information to my Gateway

 

One thing with the SSL......

 

don’t let it confuse you if you don’t see https on the index.....

 

it switches to secure once you go into the cart itself

 

should be index page

 

surefire: Gotcha. Okay. That's all the questions I've got... anything else you want to add?

 

Critical Mass: You covered quite a bit...

 

Critical Mass: are you thinking of discussing modifications at a later date?

 

surefire: Sure... but if you have something about modifications you'd like to add, that'd be great

 

Critical Mass: I don’t think at this time if we are pushing for an ongoing type of thing

 

surefire: Yeah. I'll go ahead and post this and see what the reaction is. Thanks for your time.

Edited September 12, 2003 by surefire

[surefire]

So what do you guys think?

 

Good, boring, too advanced, too basic? Are there other aspects of OS Commerce that you want covered?

[TCH-JimE]

Hi

 

Excellent! I believe there is one further step about removing the "demo" store names that appear after a successful installation from a non-Cpanel installation

 

Jim