The open source e-commerce solution
By Stefano Gorgoni OsCommerce is really a great software. It allows
you to build a powerful e-commerce website very quickly.
osCommerce combines
open source solutions to provide a free and open e-commerce platform, which
includes the powerful PHP web scripting language, the stable Apache web server,
and the fast MySQL database server.
Default osCommerce has many features, and you can add more and more. You can
add contributions, write code by yourself, or ask to someone on forum (with more than 60,000 members!).
Installation process is web-based, and all you have to do before starting is
just to set up properly permissions on your database (i'm used to create an
account for it, with full permission on a new database, and then i remove all
but select, insert, update and delete).
After some click on web interface,
installation is done, and you just have to fix permission on a few files.
But you won't use osCommerce as is. You have to modify many things to move
from an e-commerce website to a good, cool website. And it's at this point that
you'll start appreciating the large and great community around it.
You have
to improve your website with many features, but don't worry: you can find
ready-to-use code in contributions. There are
more than 2,500 contributions (2,672 right now), and you can browse them by
category or simply search them using keywords.
But what i didn't tell you
until now is that you don't need to know php to do all of this! You may need to
know a bit about php only when you want to modify some part of code (original or
of contribs), or when you have to integrate two contributions on the original
file.
Consider this: i'm not a developer. I just know a bit about HTML and CSS, and
tried to learn some language such php and python. But i really suck!
However
i've been able to build in a short period a website, www.inari.it (it's in italian only, sorry; anyway
don't forget osCommerce is multi-language!), using osCommerce. I just added
italian language, slightly modified login process, added support for the gateway
payment i use, and changed the way reviews work (login and reviews are a bit
closer to amazon style, respectfully ;) ).
If you want a
better layout, you can do (almost?) every change, using contributions, modifying
by yourself code (html and css), or buying a ready-to-use template.
Last consideration is about Search Engine Optimization (SEO): osCommerce in
its default configuration is not really search engine friendly, but you can
simply switch the "search engine user friendly urls" option in panel and the "
prevent spider sessions" (under sessions section) to drastically improve SEO. If
you want more, you can look for "seo" among osCommerce contribution (you'll
find, for example, dynamic meta tags contributions and mod_rewrite rules).
I think osCommerce is a great application, and if you have to build an
e-commerce website you should definitively give it a try! |
