Deep Inside osCommerce: The Cookbook

In DetailosCommerce has been around since March 2000. At present there are over 10,000 live, registered osCommerce sites, and about 100,000 registered community members. Apart from providing ready-made solutions to problems, as well as a huge repository of information, the osCommerce community is a living entity with which we can all interact. With the rising success and popularity of this remarkable piece of software, things can only get better.This cookbook provides you with ready-made solutions for customizing your osCommerce installation and seasoning it with exciting new features. With a total of 69 recipes, this book helps you improve all important areas of your default installation.Written by an acknowledged osCommerce expert, the book does not only give you ready solutions that you can easily incorporate into your system, but it also explains to you how these solutions work and shows you in detail how to implement them. This also helps you learn about the underlying API and later create your own variations to suit your very own taste.The focus of this book is to give solutions to specific problems. Anyone with a working knowledge of osCommerce will find this book to be a valuable support tool. The hacks in this book are original and derived from the author's custom coding projects and support posts on the osCommerce forum and are supplementary to the existing contributions on the site.If you are completely new to osCommerce, then we suggest that you either read either Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Professional Edition or Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Beginner Edition. This cookbook, however, can be a great companion for either of these books.ApproachThis book is aimed at people with existing online stores, built using osCommerce. The book follows a systematic approach whereby users can modify and extend features on their already existing osCommerce site. Each chapter deals with a different aspect , and provides ready-made recipes for modifying code to your requirements. The author starts by explaining basic changes one can make to the design of your store, and then covers features like navigation, images, shipping and payment modules, and even explains how to make changes on the administrator's side and keeping your own recipes private.Who this book is forThis book is for people who are already familiar with osCommerce. It presumes a working knowledge of PHP and HTML, as well as basic understanding of phpMyAdmin for database inserts.