A newbie speaks

[harpo]

I have a site in development and want to use osCommerce to handle the shopping cart functions.I've downloaded osCommerce and got it running on Localhost. Through Admin, I've created some categories and products which I can see on the test site. PHPMyAdmin shows the MySQL database has been updated... so far so good.

 

Now there are a number of things I need to do, involving completely changing the content, text and style of pages, adding new database fields to be updated from the admin section, deleting others, integrating osc into my existing site pages...

 

I can see I will need to delve into the php for the relevent pages, but I really don't have time to teach myself php programming. Is osCommerce really the preserve of programmers? If this is the case, I will have to pay someone to do it or find a more user friendly shopping cart. Alternatively, am I missing a way to do my (relatively simple) shopping cart requirements myself without intricate changes to the coding?

 

Thanks.

[burt]

"Is osCommerce really the preserve of programmers?"

 

No, but a "newbie" cannot expect to do the things in osCommerce that someone with a eyars experience can do.

 

"If this is the case, I will have to pay someone to do it or find a more user friendly shopping cart"

 

There are a number of people who are good with osCommerce - hunt the forums for people who are answering questions intelligently and email or message them.

 

Of course, an alternative is to find a more user friendly software, however you also need to consider that a shopping cart is a large and complex piece of software, and the more "user friendly" a cart is, usually the more code it has, making code changes more difficult.

 

"Alternatively, am I missing a way to do my (relatively simple) shopping cart requirements myself without intricate changes to the coding?"

 

Nope, you are spot on.

[harpo]

Thanks Burt, that certainly clarifies the situation.

I suppose there's also the option of finding a very clear, very comprehensive book on the subject - does anyone have a suggestion?

[Guest]

Deep Inside osCommerce: The Cookbook

Monika Mathé

 

Is one I keep on the desk.

[♥bruyndoncx]

In the same series, there is a beginner and a more complete reference on the different parts of osCommerce.

Monica's book - which is very good, I was one of the reviewers :) delves into specific situations but does not cover all the basic stuff. If you like to investigate in the code for yourself, not a problem, if you rather read first about it, the other books might make it worthwhile.

Amazon or Safari books online might help you to make a decision based on the table of contents and samples published.

[harpo]

Thanks to both of you, I'll take a look at Amazon.

[MrPhil]

Of course, an alternative is to find a more user friendly software, however you also need to consider that a shopping cart is a large and complex piece of software, and the more "user friendly" a cart is, usually the more code it has, making code changes more difficult.

Any programming application (such as a shopping cart) can be very flexible, at the cost of low-level programming work needed to change things, or very "user friendly"/"templated"/"database-driven" with (usually) a limited ability to change something. In the latter case, you can build a shopping cart with selected items easy to change from an administration panel, but if the programmer didn't think to include a way to change some specific thing, it may be very difficult to dig through the code and figure out how to manually change it. I find that osCommerce frequently falls into the latter category, with, for instance, tax rates read from the database and applied in a certain order to the price. If you need products displayed with or without VAT for different countries, or taxes apply in some cases and not in others (or applied in a different order), it can be a royal PITA to untangle the mess and bend the code to do what you want.

[npn2531]

It almost sounds like you are starting backwards. It is generally easier to add pages to a shopping cart than to integrate a shopping cart into an existing website. You can add just about any function to OSCommerce, content management, etc, etc,