Oscommerce shopping cart with a down home look

[mtnbluet 0]

osCommerce is fully supported by the osCommerce community support forums which is currently comprised of 137,180 registered members.

The main areas of the support forums are osCommerce support, osCommerce documentation, osCommerce contributions, osCommerce development, and General topics. For the newbie osCommerce support is the place to go. The first stop is Installation and Configuration. Here you can look for members questions and even ask your own. With such a large user audience you probably don't even have to wait a week for a response. Actually usually in a couple of days some expert user or even the moderator will answer you. I call that support.

Someone asked in the Installation and Configuration section if osCommerce has a tutorial section for newbies, the answer was--this was it. Each of the newbies may have a unique installation problem and is asking for clarification on some point in the 94 plus page documentation that comes with the osCommerce shopping cart download. Before asking a question, be sure to check out the many prior questions and you just might find your question, already answered.

Other areas in the Support section to check out are the General Support, and Features and Suggestions and, of course, News and Announcements.
There are only two divisions in the osCommerce documentation, Collaborative Documentation Effort and Tips and Tricks. These are better visited by the experienced users as most of the features in osCommerce are automatic. It is best not to change any code unless you 1) have made a backup and 2) only make one step changes at a time-testing as you proceed.

Upon downloading the latest osCommerce version into an appropriate directory, go onto the internet and select to either Install or Upgrade the osCommerce cart. After clicking the mouse pointer on Install, check the boxes to install the database and add the sample data as well as save the configuration values. Next, enter the Database Server information.
You will need the Ip address or ftp address of the server hosting your website. Also, the username and password of the database is entered here along with the name of the database. Decide whether to enable persistent connections and to keep session storage in the database or as files on the server. (Next to each line is a question mark that acts as a Help when clicked on.)

Now a default setup of the osCommerce shopping cart will appear. (Some people have even made this their entire website.)
Here is a default setup that has a backup database installed so that you see some of the products and their pictures.
By following the directions on this page and going into the admin section you are easily able to load up this shopping cart with products and product descriptions.

In Cpanel when you make a backup of the newly created database you can put it into the cart4/Admin/backup directory and put all the gifs and jpegs into the cart4/Images directory and Voila!! When you go to your website http://www.thesmartcart.com/cart4 you will see all the products and their descriptions appear like magic. (Make sure you ftp the database in Ascii mode and the graphics in binary mode or you might be missing some pictures and see picture placeholders instead.)

By default Paypal is connected up to be used with this shopping cart.

Here is where you can go to download it:

http://www.oscommerce.com/ under the Blue Solutions section on the menu bar.

One last comment is that this shopping cart has a small town appeal to it. Sometimes carts can look like glorified Access tables like Zencart and no one wants to be just another number.

[develCuy 0]

yes, oscommerce can be useful. BUT!!!! its code is a mess, like spaguetti. I had the terrible experience to make a personalized virtual shop with oscommerce that taken very long. Please study carefully what kind of product you need before use. FLOSS means to have choices and OsCommerce is not the only one. If works for you.... Glory God.Blessings!