Slashdot Mirror
Building Online Stores with osCommerce
Stephanie Brain writes "Have you ever considered building your own online store and entering into the booming e-commerce arena? If you have, you may have come across some of the many open-source software available for downloading from the Internet. One of the most popular of these is OsCommerce which has been developed since March 2000 and has a full team of staff dedicated to its development. It is overseen by the founder, Harald Ponce de Leon and today there are around 6000 live, registered OsCommerce sites and 70000 registered community members, many of whom are active on the OSC forum you can log on to. This forum can provide a wealth of information when you come up against any obstacle when developing your own OsCommerce website." Read the rest of Stephanie's review.
Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Professional Edition
author
David Mercer
pages
372
publisher
Packt Publishing
rating
9
reviewer
Stephanie Brain
ISBN
1-904811-14-0
summary
Practical guide to building online stores with osCommerce
Back in October I started working with someone who had already downloaded the OSC software and had the basis of an online store installed. I will be running the store, however my first task was to change the whole look of the site and make improvements to it before launching NetTechShop properly. Having read the OsCommerce blurb which promotes the simplicity of using OSC, I felt sure that I could quickly get to grips with the "simple" programming language of PhP and HTML and have the site ready in a month or two. I was sadly disappointed! By the end of November last year I was getting desperate, having spent hours making modifications to the coding on the database only to either break the site completely or find it had not made one jot of difference to the look of the site. I searched in vain for OsCommerce For Dummies.
My pain was somewhat relieved when I discovered that a book was going to be published on OsCommerce by Packt Publishing and I put my order in immediately and breathed a great sigh of relief.
Strangely such a book has been lacking until now. You can find plenty of books about Php programming and MySQL or HTML, but try to find a book which is easy to understand for someone with less than a University or College IT qualification background and about OsCommerce in particular and you will search long and hard.
David Mercer's book is the book you have been looking for and is available in either a beginner's or professional edition. It is written in a straightforward, easy to understand manner, yet does not compromise on technical knowledge and provides all the essentials of getting your website up and running with OsCommerce.
The book covers: installing MySQL, PHP, Apache and OsCommerce and testing them, configuration and customization of your store, working with data, taxes, payment and shipping, securing your store, installing more advanced feature using contributions from the OsCommerce website and deployment and maintenance of your site.
Before going onto the technical aspects and explanation of OsCommerce, Mercer explores the whole area of e-Commerce, what is required of a website store to make it a success, the arguments for using an open-source solution such as OsCommerce and the decision making issues any business faces when deciding if OsCommerce is right for them.
This manual was everything I hoped it would be and with its many illustrations, including screenshots of the files you will be changing on an OsC website, I found that anyone with even the most basic understanding of website design, would be able to get to grips with designing a website store using OsCommerce. I had the professional edition and found it really easy to just dip into when I needed to know some aspect of the design process. The book's content is well laid out, in manageable chunks with bold headings, which are clear about the content and the index is comprehensive.
One of the things I really liked about the book was that it addressed the problems, error messages and frustrations you are likely to come up against in the process of building your OsCommerce site. Those were the things that made my head spin the most before I got the book and although you should be able to find out about many of your error messages and problems on the OsCommerce forums, it can take quite a time to search and plough through all the replies. It is much better to find the most common problems in one place with practical solutions.
Another important chapter which is covered in depth is the installation and testing of a payment module. The most popular of these, Paypal is covered in the book and detailed instructions are given on how to get it working correctly, again something which sounds easy on paper, but can cause endless problems if you do it wrong. There are other payment providers and gateways which can be integrated onto your OsCommerce site by installing other so-called "contributions" from the OsCommerce website and Mercer explains fully how to download these contributions and get them functioning correctly.
I am sure that this book will prove to be an essential resource for anyone contemplating starting an online business with open-source OsCommerce software and hopefully will avoid them spending wasted energy in the initial stages just trying to figure it all out. After I received my book, the only wasted energy I spent was wondering why the front cover was emblazoned with juicy oranges!"
You can purchase Building Online Stores with osCommerce from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Back in October I started working with someone who had already downloaded the OSC software and had the basis of an online store installed. I will be running the store, however my first task was to change the whole look of the site and make improvements to it before launching NetTechShop properly. Having read the OsCommerce blurb which promotes the simplicity of using OSC, I felt sure that I could quickly get to grips with the "simple" programming language of PhP and HTML and have the site ready in a month or two. I was sadly disappointed! By the end of November last year I was getting desperate, having spent hours making modifications to the coding on the database only to either break the site completely or find it had not made one jot of difference to the look of the site. I searched in vain for OsCommerce For Dummies.
My pain was somewhat relieved when I discovered that a book was going to be published on OsCommerce by Packt Publishing and I put my order in immediately and breathed a great sigh of relief.
Strangely such a book has been lacking until now. You can find plenty of books about Php programming and MySQL or HTML, but try to find a book which is easy to understand for someone with less than a University or College IT qualification background and about OsCommerce in particular and you will search long and hard.
David Mercer's book is the book you have been looking for and is available in either a beginner's or professional edition. It is written in a straightforward, easy to understand manner, yet does not compromise on technical knowledge and provides all the essentials of getting your website up and running with OsCommerce.
The book covers: installing MySQL, PHP, Apache and OsCommerce and testing them, configuration and customization of your store, working with data, taxes, payment and shipping, securing your store, installing more advanced feature using contributions from the OsCommerce website and deployment and maintenance of your site.
Before going onto the technical aspects and explanation of OsCommerce, Mercer explores the whole area of e-Commerce, what is required of a website store to make it a success, the arguments for using an open-source solution such as OsCommerce and the decision making issues any business faces when deciding if OsCommerce is right for them.
This manual was everything I hoped it would be and with its many illustrations, including screenshots of the files you will be changing on an OsC website, I found that anyone with even the most basic understanding of website design, would be able to get to grips with designing a website store using OsCommerce. I had the professional edition and found it really easy to just dip into when I needed to know some aspect of the design process. The book's content is well laid out, in manageable chunks with bold headings, which are clear about the content and the index is comprehensive.
One of the things I really liked about the book was that it addressed the problems, error messages and frustrations you are likely to come up against in the process of building your OsCommerce site. Those were the things that made my head spin the most before I got the book and although you should be able to find out about many of your error messages and problems on the OsCommerce forums, it can take quite a time to search and plough through all the replies. It is much better to find the most common problems in one place with practical solutions.
Another important chapter which is covered in depth is the installation and testing of a payment module. The most popular of these, Paypal is covered in the book and detailed instructions are given on how to get it working correctly, again something which sounds easy on paper, but can cause endless problems if you do it wrong. There are other payment providers and gateways which can be integrated onto your OsCommerce site by installing other so-called "contributions" from the OsCommerce website and Mercer explains fully how to download these contributions and get them functioning correctly.
I am sure that this book will prove to be an essential resource for anyone contemplating starting an online business with open-source OsCommerce software and hopefully will avoid them spending wasted energy in the initial stages just trying to figure it all out. After I received my book, the only wasted energy I spent was wondering why the front cover was emblazoned with juicy oranges!"
You can purchase Building Online Stores with osCommerce from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
How come the books reviewed here are always rated 8, 9, or 10? Some of them must surely be shittier than that.
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
Is it built in a way that lets it pass PCI Compliancy testing? That's a big deal since last year, and many of us with eCommerce merchant sites are still struggling to comply with the myriad of rules and restricts imposed by Visa and Mastercard.
:::: Mike Snyder
What I ended up doing was writing a bit that would inject item info from my layout and database into the OSC one once a person added the item to their cart. Not real elegant, but it works well. The frustrating bit is that OSC is hands-down the best open cart program I've seen.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
As bad as the bugs are in PHP, I'd have to say that the biggest thing you have to fear with ECommerce sites is badly written code in any language. A well written site in PHP is much better off than a poorly written site in J2EE. Most of the insecurity problems with ecommerce sites are due to bad coding, and not the underlying technology used.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
First off - I love osCommerce. I run a web store using it, have written several popular contributions and participate in the official forum. But the reviewer can perhaps be excused for thinking that there has not been a book on osCommerce before this - there are several. The problem is that Harald (or one of his minions) quickly removes from the forum any mention of any commercial product (book, add-on, service, etc.) relating to osCommerce other than those from his advertisers. Go to amazon.com and search for "oscommerce" - you'll get many hits.
Also censored from the forum is any mention of other cart software, especially those derived from osCommerce such as Zen Cart and CRE. Want to show how to interface osCommerce to a free API that also has a commercial version? Censored. Want to talk about your experience with a web host or SSL certificate provider? Censored. I once had an extended exchange with one of the forum moderators who seemed to equate "open source" to "one source".
In any event, osCommerce is "not for wimps". A lot of people think the same way the reviewer did - that you download it, install it, and have an instant web store suitable for your customers. It took me about four months the first time to where I had something I would be willing to let customers see, and another year before I learned enough about it to customize it for the particular business and create something of a unique look. (I'm a software engineer with more than 25 years of experience and twenty or so languages under my belt.) You need to understand at least basic PHP, and some familiarity with MySQL wouldn't hurt either. One of the worst features is that making changes to the overall "look" of an osCommerce store requires editing some thirty or more source files.
The current version of osCommerce was released three years ago. A small set of bug fixes was released last November. There has been ongoing work on a "Milestone 3" version that appears to introduce significant incompatibilities with the current and popular MS2. Personally, I'm skeptical that MS3 will ever be released, and even if it is, I think that most of the current MS2 users will ignore it.
Again, I love osCommerce. It is great software and I do what I can to support the community. If you don't mind getting your hands dirty, there's so much you can do with it and hundreds of user add-ons and modifications. You should also look at the derivatives such as Zen and CRE. (These are two that come to mind, there may be others.) But if the letters PHP scare you, then you're better off looking elsewhere.
Yes it's easier to get a web developer to do all these things for you, but it will cost a whole load of money, which many business start-ups cannot afford.
Surely it is worth taking time to try to work it out?
As bad as the bugs are in PHP, I'd have to say that the biggest thing you have to fear with ECommerce sites is badly written code in any language.
I have to disagree with this. What you're saying is "PHP sucks but everything sucks because you can write bad code there, too." Of course bad code can come in any language; the point isn't about other languages, it's about PHP and the serious lack of attention to detail.
The recent XMLRPC security flaw comes to mind -- that would have (probably) never happened in the python, perl or ruby communities because those communities are security-minded and therefore attracts like-minded people.
Put another way: PHP is sloppy and attracts sloppy developers to work on it.
The appeal of osC is the 2000 contributions that are available for free as extensions. Having helped several people set up stores with it, basically whatever customization people want, someone else has already made it and published it for free, so there has been a very low cost to get started with osCommerce for each store.
Still, I agree it can be painful and scary to work with. I miss automated test suite, like I'm using to building based on Perl's Test::WWW::Mechanize. It pains to me to hand apply a patch that doesn't come as a diff, but a series of instructions like "Around line 23, notice this code and add this line....".
In the short term, I support osCommerce for pragmatic reasons. For the longer term, I encourage developers to continue to build cleaner solutions from the ground up. For Perl, see Handel as a starting point.
interchange rocks, but the learning curve is STEEP - much steeper than oscommerce, although once you make it to the top you've learned yourself a nice extensible system instead of a giant mountain of crap like OSC :)
add to that the extreme unhelpfulness/bitchiness of the mailing lists/core devs, lack of 'how do i get started' documentation, and the lack of modules to support many payment methods (afaik, there's still no good, supported, paypal option!) has always discouraged me from using IC.
my sense is that the core devs are more interested in charging folks to install/integrate IC than they are about making IC accessible to the public. i don't have any beef with that - it's a great project. but you really can just drop in OSC and have a crappy, ugly, but working store. you can't do that with IC, which is why OSC has the market share.
In the last month I have downloaded this software and spent countless hours building it from scratch. There is no template management system and everything is a mix of PHP and HTML. Every php file is a HUUUUGE collection of nested IF/THEN/ELSE's. I can't even imagine what the programmers were thinking. The image caching was also corrupting the images randomly. If you "purchase" a template like i did, its actually all the PHP files just rewritten. I ended up just scrapping it and moving over to x-cart last week. Yeah it set me back $400 but It must have 100x more features and also has 100x less headaches. It also uses smarty templates.
I know what you mean!
I did an osCommerce site for an artist (http://www.bydon.org/shop) and modifying the layout was a nightmare. Because of the fact there is no separation between PHP code and layout, it is a case of traversing through nearly 50 jumbled files and manually changing many lines. It is a thing I never want to repeat EVER.
"The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One stands for danger; the other for opportunity
I haven't used osCommerce myself, but my cow-orkers have and they declare it to be one of the biggest, steamiest piles of bovine excrement that the open source world has ever seen.
/dev/null.
What they considered to be the worst feature of osCommerce were its "modules". Like many software products, you can install "modules" for added functionality. There were dozens of "modules" available. Imagine our surprise when we found out that osCommerce "modules" were really just patches against the already horrible code base. Most, not all, went in cleanly on a brand spanking new osCommerce installation. However, these module "authors" hardly, if ever, verified that their mod^H^H^Hpatches applied cleanly with other patches already installed. The result is obvious: modules rarely coexisted with each other.
Which, of course, defeated the whole purpose of modules. We also found out that customers really don't take it all that well when you tell them that their website can only have one feature or another but not both. They take their business elsewhere.
We took osCommerce to
Keep in mind Interchange grew out of a time when the web was wild and young, and pre-packaged e-commerce options were few.
These days, Perl's CPAN offers a tremendous amount more in the way of high quality building blocks for such a project, but nothing I'm aware of has been built with this approach with a feature-set that comes close to rivaling osCommerce. Handel is start, but only covers basic shopping cart functions now.