Deep Inside osCommerce: The Cookbook

osCommerce 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.

The book has 11 chapters, each dealing with a different aspect of osCommerce.

Chapter 1 equips you with a few very easy and very important changes to the basic design which will make developing and later modifying a whole new template a breeze.

Chapter 2 will help you modify your navigation to ensure a smoother shopping experience for your customers.

Chapter 3 covers infoboxes and turns you into an expert in tweaking them to your needs.

Chapter 4 deals with one of the most important visual parts of your shop, the product display in the listings and the detail page.

Chapter 5 outlines different methods to make searching on your site a fun experience. You want your customers to use your search and to find the products you want to sell to them.

Chapter 6 highlights customizations of the checkout process, namely the flow from the shopping cart to the shipping and payment pages up to the order email.

Chapter 7 talks about new shipping modules. You will learn how to adapt existing modules to create completely new rate systems for your shop.

Chapter 8 focuses on existing payment modules and how they can be tweaked.

Chapter 9 provides tips on efficiently using banners as a marketing tool.

Chapter 10 is a goodie bag of extra special treats to indulge your sweet tooth.

Chapter 11 tackles changes in the admin area. You alone will be the keeper of these secret recipes hidden to the public eye.

This 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. 

This 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.